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tinguished senators, and their associates in the house of representatives, is nothing, except so far as the positions which they shall maintain shall bear on the result of the present contest to establish a new and better policy in the country. I know not, indeed, whether I shall be found hereafter laboring with them in efforts to promote the public welfare, or whether they will return to your councils, and labor in your own ranks as heretofore. Nevertheless, I am sure of this-that you will not succeed in discrediting and proscribing them; for either you provide for yourselves a defeat, which the signs of the times indicate, or, in lieu of that, you will go down to 1860 under the influence of sentiments and feelings very different from that of 1858. A party in power in the first year of an administration, is apt to be bold and violent. A party going out of power at the ciose of an administration generally is timid and hesitating. You will search the summits in New Hampshire, the plains in Mexico, and the halls of St. James in London, to find a presidential candidate in 1860, who was against the conference-Lecompton-Kansas bill in 1858; and then, if these honorable gentlemen with whom I have labored for a short time so pleasantly, shall be found yet remaining within your political communion, I think I can promise them that you will come to a much better understanding with them than you have now.'

now,

While I am yet speaking, I learn that this bill, of so much evil omen, has passed the house of representatives. I confess to you that it produces in my mind, if some disappointment, no discouragement. I confess that I am prepared for this conclusion; and that when it has come (for what remains to be done in this chamber is a matter of course), it is to me utterly indifferent. I have known all the while that this was to be either our last defeat or our first victory. Either result was sure to be quite welcome. For Kansas, for freedom in Kansas, I have not so much concern as I have about the place where I shall sleep to-night, although my house is hard by the place where I stand. Kansas is the Cinderella of the American family. She is insulted, she is buffeted, she is smitten and disgraced, she is turned out of the dwelling, and the door is locked against her. There is always, however, a fairy that takes care of the younger daughter, if she be the most virtuous, the most truthful, the meekest, and the most enduring inmate of the domestic circle. Kansas

1 These predictions were singularly verified at the Charleston and Baltimore conventions of 1860. See Memoir ante page 74.

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will live and survive your persecution. She will live to defend, protect and sustain you. The time will come when her elder sisterssisters now so arrogant, Louisiana, Virginia and Pennsylvania— will repent themselves of all the injustice they have done to her. Her trials have not been imposed on her for naught. She has been made to take the hard and hazardous position of being the first of the states to vindicate practically by labor, by toil, through desolation, through suffering and blood, the principle that freedom is better for states and for the republic than slavery. She will endure the trial nobly to the end, as she has borne it hitherto; and as she has been the first, so she will be the last to contend and to suffer. Every territory that shall come into the Union hereafter, profiting by the sufferings and atonement of Kansas, will come into the Union a free state. This unnecessary strife, so unwisely provoked by slavery, draws to its end. The effort to make slave states within our domain, is against reason and against nature. The trees do not spring up from the roots and seeds scattered by the parent trunks in the forest more naturally than new free states spring up from the political roots projected and the social seed scattered by the old free states. New stars do not form themselves out of the nebulæ in the recesses of space, and come out to adorn and illuminate the blue expanse above us more necessarily or more harmoniously than new free states shape themselves out of the ever-developing elements of our benign civilization, and rise to take their places in this great political constellation. Reason and hope rejoice in this majestic and magnificent process. Let, then, nature, reason and hope have their heavenappointed way. Resist them no longer!

NOTE.-While these pages are going through the press (January, 1861), the struggle for the admission of Kansas has ended. On the 30th day of January, the president signed the act of admission, and Kansas became a free state. The bill was moved in the senate by Mr. Seward on the twenty-first, and passed on the same day: ayes 36, nays 16. See Memoir ante page 117.

THE STATE OF THE COUNTRY.'

In coming forward among the political astrologers, it shall be an error of judgment, and not of disposition, if my interpretation of the feverish dreams which are disturbing the country shall tend to foment, rather than to allay, the national excitement. I shall say nothing unnecessarily of persons, because, in our system, the public welfare and happiness depend chiefly on institutions, and very little on men. I shall allude but briefly to incidental topics, because they are ephemeral, and because, even in the midst of appeals to passion and prejudice, it is always safe to submit solid truth to the deliberate consideration of an honest and enlightened people.

It will be an everflowing source of shame, as well as of sorrow, if we, thirty millions-Europeans by extraction, Americans by birth or discipline, and Christians in faith, and meaning to be such in practice cannot so combine prudence with humanity, in our conduct concerning the one disturbing subject of slavery, as not only to preserve our unequaled institutions of freedom, but also to enjoy their benefits with contentment and harmony.

Wherever a guiltless slave exists, be he Caucasian, American, Malay or African, he is the subject of two distinct and opposite ideas-one that he is wrongly, the other that he is rightly a slave. The balance of numbers on either side, however great, never completely extinguishes this difference of opinion, for there are always some defenders of slavery outside, even if there are none inside of a free state, while also there are always outside, if there are not inside of every slave state, many who assert with Milton, that "no man who knows aught can be so stupid as to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey." It often, perhaps generally, happens, however,

1 Speech in the United States Senate, February 29, 1860. The bill before the Senate being "the admission of Kansas," Mr. Seward commenced by saying: "The admission of Kansas into the Union, without further delay, seems to me equally necessary, just and wise. In recorded debates I have already anticipated the arguments for this conclusion.'

that in considering the subject of slavery, society seems to overlook the natural right, or personal interest of the slave himself, and to act exclusively for the welfare of the citizen. But this fact does not materially affect ultimate results, for the elementary question of the rightfulness or wrongfulness of slavery inheres in every form that discussion concerning it assumes. What is just to one class of men can never be injurious to any other; and what is unjust to any condition of persons in a state, is necessarily injurious in some degree to the whole community. An economical question early arises out of the subject of slavery-labor either of freemen or of slaves is the cardinal necessity of society. Some states choose the one kind, some the other. Hence, two municipal systems widely different arise. The slave state strikes down and affects to extinguish the personality of the laborer, not only as a member of the political body, but also as a parent, husband, child, neighbor or friend. He thus becomes, in a political view, merely property, without moral capacity, and without domestic, moral, and social relations, duties, rights, and remedies—a chattel, an object of bargain, sale, gift, inheritance or theft. His earnings are compensated and his wrongs atoned, not to himself, but to his owner. The state protects not the slave as a man, but the capital of another man, which he represents. On the other hand, the state which rejects slavery encourages and animates and invigorates the laborer by maintaining and developing his natural personality in all the rights and faculties of manhood, and generally with the privileges of citizenship. In the one case, capital invested in slaves becomes a great political force; while in the other, labor, thus elevated and enfranchised, becomes the dominating political power. It thus happens that we may, for convenience sake, and not inaccurately, call slave states capital states, and free states labor

states.

So soon as a state feels the impulses of commerce, or enterprise, or ambition, its citizens begin to study the effects of these systems of capital and labor respectively on its intelligence, its virtue, its tranquillity, its integrity or unity, its defense, its prosperity, its liberty, its happiness, its aggrandizement, and its fame. In other words, the great question arises, whether slavery is a moral, social and political good, or a moral, social and political evil. This is the slavery question at home. But there is a mutual bond of amity and brotherhood between man and man throughout the world. Nations examine freely the political

systems of each other, and of all preceding times, and accordingly as they approve or disapprove of the two systems of capital and labor respectively they sanction and prosecute, or condemn and prohibit, commerce in men. Thus, in one way or in another, the slavery question, which so many among us, who are more willing to rule than patient in studying the condition of society, think is a merely accidental or unnecessary question that might and ought to be settled and dismissed at once, is, on the contrary, a world-wide and enduring subject of political consideration and civil administration. Men, states and nations entertain it, not voluntarily, but because the progress of society continually brings it into their way. They divide upon it, not perversely, but because, owing to differences of constitution, condition or circumstances, they cannot agree. The fathers of the republic encountered it. They even adjusted it so that it might have given us much less than our present disquiet, had not circumstances afterwards occurred which they, wise as they were, had not clearly foreseen. Although they had inherited, yet they generally condemned the practice of slavery, and hoped for its discontinuance. They expressed this when they asserted in the Declaration of Independence, as a fundamental principle of American society, that all men are created equal, and have inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Each state, however, reserved to itself exclusive political power over the subject of slavery within its own borders. Nevertheless, it unavoidably presented itself in their consultation on a bond of Federal Union. The new government was to be a representative one. Slaves were capital in some states, in others capital had no investments in labor. Should those slaves be represented as capital or as persons, taxed as capital or as persons, or should they not be represented or taxed at all? The fathers disagreed, debated long, and compromised at last. Each state, they determined, shall have two senators in congress. Three-fifths of the slaves shall be elsewhere represented, and be taxed as persons. What should be done if the slave should escape into a labor state? Should that state confess him to be a chattel, and restore him as such, or might it regard him as a person, and harbor and protect him as a man? They compromised again, and decided that no person held to labor or service in one state by the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, by any law or regulation of that state, be discharged

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