which we have lavished millions of treasure, to which we have set the seal of our best blood. That which might have been graceful concession two years since, would be base submission to-day.

Base and unavailing! What are the proposals now, rife throughout the North-West, among the friends of peace-atany-price? Worst devise of feeble or faithless heads, busily echoed by thousands of faint hearts, embodied in public resolutions, trumpeted through hundreds of newspapers, what is the favorite project, long matured in secret, that is urged upon you to-day by the enemies of the war and of the Administration that conducts it?

Of vast import is that project, yet a few words suffice to state it. The greatest of human changes can be expressed in one word-Death!

The project is, to reconstruct the Union, leaving out the New England States.

This plan is spoken of as a compromise. The South, abandoning her avowed intention to erect a separate purely slaveholding Confederacy, is to consent to receive into her fellowship a portion of the Northern States. The Northern States, in return, are to abandon six of their number; those six in which the opinions against which the war is waged chiefly prevail.

But this plan is no after-thought-no compromise whatever. It has been in the minds and intentions of the Southern leaders from the very commencement of the rebellion.

I vouch for the truth of the following: Early in January, 1861, a few days after South Carolina had seceded, and before any other State had followed her example, Senator Benjamin, of Louisiana, said to one of the Foreign Ministers: "A great revolution has commenced. It will end in the separation from the Union either of the slave States or of New England."

Within a few days of the same time, before Jefferson Davis had left Washington, Mrs. Davis, conversing with a friend from Pennsylvania, who had been lamenting a probable separation, replied, in substance: "Do not afflict yourself. We shall not separate from Pennsylvania, nor New York, nor New Jersey; they, like the North-West, are our natural allies."

It was the original plan, abandoned for a time, when the entire North rose in arms; unavowed even now; yet secretly fomented and sanctioned ever since the elections seemed to result adversely to the Administration, and since meetings and newspapers, calling themselves Democratic, have been sending forth, to an enemy in arms, words of sympathy and comfort.

Well might such a plan be the first choice of the secessionists! Well may they intrigue with the North-West to favor and

adopt it now! Far better for them than a mere Southern Confederacy, never was a more specious nor a more daring device to uphold a sinking cause!

Look at it, I pray you; not vaguely or hastily, but carefully, and in all its practical details. In the Senate, thirty Southern votes to twenty-two Northern; in the House, ninety Southern votes to a hundred and thirteen Northern. One House hopelessly gone; while twelve votes changed would give a Southern majority in the other. And when has Congress seen the day when twice twelve votes could not have been had from Northern Representatives for any measure the South saw fit to propose ? Just North enough in the scheme to afford protection and support to slavery; and not North enough to exert over it the slightest influence or control.

Plausible, too! "You have a majority in one House, and we in the other. What can be more fair?"

But mark the workings of the plan! A free State applies for admission. The Bill must pass the Senate. Will it pass? Slaveholders have to decide that question. Will they relinquish the balance of power which they hold in their grasp ? While they retain their reason, never! A slave State for every free State admitted; that will be the rule. The controlling majority in the Senate, therefore, perpetual!

Think, next, of the nominations by the President-a President, of course, who believes in the justice, and in the per petual duration of negro slavery-for none other will be suffered to take his seat; nominations of Cabinet officers; of Foreign Ministers and Consuls; of Judges of the Supreme Court; of Generals in the army; of men to all lucrative Post-offices; of Registers and Receivers, and all the long list of other nominations to offices in the gift of the President and confirmatory by the Senate. Will the name of one man pass the ordeal who thinks human servitude a sin or an evil, or who believes that "slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction?" It will be a Senate requiring a political test for office that would have excluded Washington, if proposed for Brigadier General, or Jefferson, if nominated as a member of the Cabinet. For Washington, on the 9th of September, 1786, wrote to John F. Mercer, of Maryland: "It is among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law." And Jefferson, in his "Summary View of the Rights of British America," originally published in August, 1774, said: "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in these Colonies, where it was, unhappily, introduced in their infant state;" + while, eight years later, in his

*Sparks' Washington, vol. ix., p. 159. Jefferson's Works, vol. i., p. 135.

"Notes on Virginia," he falls into that "erroneous religious be lief" which, according to the South Carolina Declaration, renders hopeless all remedy for the grievances of the South. Adverting to a possible conflict, in the future, between slave and slaveholder, he says: "The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."*

If this view of revolutionary opinions should happen to surprise you, it will be because you are less accurately informed on the subject than the Vice President of the insurrectionary States. Let Mr. Stephens have credit for the honesty with which, in the address from which I have already quoted, he made this confession: "The prevailing ideas entertained by Jefferson and most of the leading statesmen, at the time of the formation of the old Constitution, were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically." The "ultimate extinotion" heresy, too, was shared by these men, as Mr. Stephens thus reminds us: "Slavery was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent, and pass away."+

Reconstruct the Union without New England, and no man who shares these revolutionary sentiments,-no man who believes as Washington and Jefferson believed, can ever reach the Presidential chair, or ever receive, from the occupant of that chair, any office, at home or abroad, civil or military, of any importance whatever.

The vast patronage of the Government-the tens of millions annually in its gift-would become a gigantic bribe. Its demoralizing influence in calling forth professions of a money-getting creed, would be immense.

But well would it be if this wholesale premium on hypocrisy were the only evil, or the worst evil, which a South-controlled Congress would bring upon us. What laws would such a Congress pass ?

The characteristic political doctrine universally asserted throughout the South is this: "The Constitution provides that 'the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.' Therefore all citizens are entitled, wherever they may reside, to equal rights of property. Neither the Federal Government nor a State has a right to discriminate between different kinds of property, legally held. It is unconstitutional to declare by law that any legally

Jefferson's Writings, vol. viii., p. 404.

Address of A. H. Stephens, reported, as stated in a previous note, in the "Sa vannah Republican."

held property is property in one portion of the Union, and is not property in another. It is equally unconstitutional for the Federal Government, or for any State, to pass laws which shall prohibit the transfer of any legally held property from one portion of the Union to another; or to enact that any one species of property legally used in any one State or Territory may not be used in another.

"But slaves are property: as absolutely and legally articles of merchandise (though differing in kind) as horses, or cattle, or flocks of sheep; property righteously as well as legally held; property the holding of which is based on a great physical, philosophical, and moral truth, and is sanctioned by religion.

Therefore, wherever one citizen may lawfully take or use his cattle and horses and flocks of sheep, another citizen may lawfully take and use his slaves. To prohibit him from so doing is a moral wrong, as well as an unconstitutional act.” *

That is the openly-avowed doctrine and demand of the South. Individual exceptions to such opinions there are, of course, in the slave States, just as, in the free States, men are found who believe that slavery is enjoined by morality and sanctioned by religion. But the official declarations of the South prove, and no honest slaveholder will deny, that I have here fairly and candidly stated the leading article, never to be relinquished, of their political creed.

Upon this doctrine was based that claim of the South to equal rights of settlement in the Territories, the expected denial of which was one of the chief incentives to this war. But it is evident that if the doctrine be tenable at all, it applies as justly to a State as to a Territory. An Indianian may buy a Kentucky farm and settle thereon with all his movable property. Shall a Kentuckian be forbidden to settle, in like manner, ou a farm in Indiana, unless he shall first sell the most valuable mo, able property he possesses?

It is not more certain that the earth will continue to revolve around the sun, than that the South, while slaveholding, will persevere, whenever and wherever she obtains the political ascendency, in asserting and enforcing by law what she regards as her political rights in this matter.

* If any man doubt that this is the claim maintained by the South, and short of which she will never be satisfied, let him read the note on the last page of this pamphlet, on recent legal opinions and decisions touching slaves.

These afford conclusive proof that the South, with the power in her hands, would declare null and void, because in violation of the Constitution of the United States, the provision in the Constitution of Indiana excluding negroes. Should we tolerate a similar provision excluding our horses and cattle from Kentucky? A State' cannot, without the consent of Congress, even lay a duty on property brought within her limits from another State; far less, of course, can she exclude it altogether.

Choose, then, farmers of Indiana! citizens of the North-West! Strike off twenty-nine votes from the northern majority of the House. Abandon, by the cession of twelve votes more, your present majority in the Senate. Consent to the dismemberment of your country. Relinquish for ever to the South the balance of legislative power. Do this, if you will. But bear in mind, that on the day you assent to the scandalous compact, you will have virtually repealed that noble ORDINANCE to which the North-West owes not freedom only, but a social and commercial prosperity far outstripping that of any slave-tilled State. Bear in mind that on that day you will have to decide, which of two alternatives you will advise your sons to select ;-to regard honest labor as unbecoming a gentleman, or to take their chance of working in sight of the overseer, side by side with the slave.

Do all this, if good it seem to you. I make no argument against it. Facts, not counsels, are what I offer you. I but seek to shed daylight on the slaveholders' project; to show you, beforehand, what it is you are invited to do.

The invitation is, to unite your fate with a slave empire; not an empire part free and part slave, but an empire all slave; an empire in every portion of which slavery will be permitted by law, and restricted as to the number of slaves by soil and climate alone. The invitation is to become, yourselves, part and • parcel of such an empire; to enter into fellowship with those who, not content to legalize slavery, canonize it also; regard it as philosophical, commend it as moral, extol it as religious: who adopt it as the corner-stone of the social edifice and the basis of the political system.

The invitation is, to ignore, or to defy, the public sentiment of Christendom. The invitation is to stand still, or sink back, while all other civilized nations advance. An eminent writer, alluding to certain ancient collegiate foundations of Europe, declared that they were not without their use to the historian of the human mind: immovably moored to the same station by the strength of their cables and the weight of their anchors, they served to mark the rapidity of the current with which the rest of the world was borne along. Is such to be the fate and the vocation of America, once proud, powerful, freedom-loving? Is God's mighty current of Progress to sweep past her, as she lies paralyzed, weighted down, rock-stranded, by her political

sins?

This invitation is given on conditions. The first is, that throughout this slave empire, no man shall be allowed to deny the "great physical, philosophical, and moral truth", now first recognized, upon which the new Government is founded; namely, that slavery is the natural and moral condition of the African