Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/174

164 the Territories acquired from Mexico slavery was abolished and prohibited by local legislation, but the extension of the Missouri line was calculated to admit slavery into all that part of it which lies South of 36° 30′. Mark well: So long as the Missouri Compromise served to introduce Slave States, he did not dream of its unconstitutionality. When, by the extension of the Missouri line, free territory could be converted into slave territory, he found it so eminently convenient, so excellent an arrangement, that he not only proposed to preserve it in its original extent, but to run it across the whole continent, to the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

But now the time arrives when Free States are to grow up under the guaranties of the same Missouri Compromise. A new light dawns upon Judge Douglas. He rises in the Senate chamber, and asserts that the Territory North of the Missouri line can no longer be exempted from slavery, because the exclusion of slavery from it—the very condition on which Missouri was admitted as a Slave State—was at war with the fundamental principles of the Constitution. The same man who had cursed as ruthless the hand that would violate the Missouri Compromise, as long as that compact was beneficial to slavery, tore it down with his own hands as soon as it was to serve the interests of free labor. And he is the truest “champion of freedom!” How wonderful a change! At the time when he proposed the extension of the Missouri line to the Pacific Ocean, he was either convinced of the unconstitutionality of that compromise, or he was not. If he was, how could he conscientiously propose the extension and perpetuation of a measure which he considered a crime against the Constitution? Were his conscience and his convictions leashed into silence by the interests of slavery? Or if he was not, how did it come to pass that he became so suddenly convinced of that unconstitu-