Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/363

 Slavery Question in Oregon. 335 aspirations of the human soul, never acts as a boomerang, and if the anti-slavery men of Oregon had thrown their weight into the balance in the year 1856, there would have been no anxiety upon the subject in 1857 and there would have been no need of a plebiscite upon it at any time. That they did not do so was not from fear that the expression of an opinion against slavery would promote it, but from other reasons which have been set forth in previous pages, reasons too which serve to emphasize the tendency of partisan habits to divert people's minds away from a proper and critical examination of the real issues at hand. The manner in which the question was met here, tended to cultivate and foster the notion or claim of the extremists of the South, that slavery, as an institution in the United States, was entitled to equal rights with free institutions; that the equities were the same, and that the only question up for decision was one of financial expediency which every man could or should decide for himself. All that he needed to determine it was a slate and pencil— no need of books relating to morals or history; no call for agitation, conventions or other modes of forming and expressing public opinion; just simply market reports of the price of slaves and the products of their toil, with perhaps some allusion to the superiority and dignity of the master class. This was the aspect in which our Southern brethren desired the Oregon people to view the question, and the Oregon politicians so ruled. And why this billing and cooing with the sable wench, when the question was whether her baleful progeny should inherit the earth? Was it genuine love or even decent respect? Neither — it was the merest coquetry made necessary in the game of politics which had been debauching the American people for half a century. It was only by such adulation of the harlot that the avenues leading to public employment were open to the office-seekers of the North ; and that such an inducement could sink a whole party into vassalage is a humiliating com- mentary upon human nature. But just this kind of denou- ment must be expected when a party has abandoned its prin-