Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/230

218 what we never stipulated to do, what is not "so nominated in the bond." He wrests the resolution against freedom, and for the furtherance of the slave power.

II. and III. Mr. Webster has given his answer to the second and third questions, which may be considered as a single question. Shall slavery be legally forbidden by Congress in California and New Mexico ? Mr. Webster is opposed to the prohibition by Congress. Herd are his words: "Now, as to California and New Mexico, I hold slavery to be excluded from those territories by a law even superior to that which admits and sanctions it in Texas. I mean the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth." … "I will say further, that if a resolution or a law were now before us to provide a territorial government for New Mexico, I would not vote to put any prohibition into it whatever. The use of such a prohibition would be idle, as it respects any effect it would have upon the territory: and I would not take pains to re-affirm an ordinance of nature, nor to re-enact the will of God." "The gentlemen who belong to the Southern States would think it a taunt, an indignity; they would think it an act taking away from them what they regard as a proper equality of privilege"… "a plain theoretic wrong," "more or less derogatory to their character and their rights." "African slavery," he tells us, "cannot exist there." It could once exist in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Very little of this territory lies north of Mason and Dixon's line, the northern limit of Maryland ; none above the parallel of forty-two degrees; none of it extends fifty miles above the northern limit of Virginia; two hundred and four thousand three hundred and fifty-three square miles of it lie south of the line of the Missouri Compromise, south of 36° 30'. Almost all of it is in the latitude of Virginia and the Carolinas. If slavery can exist on the west coast of the Atlantic, I see not why it cannot on the east of the Pacific, and all the way between. There is no reason why it cannot. It will, unless we forbid it by positive laws, laws which no man can misunderstand. Why, in 1787, it was thought necessary to forbid slavery in the North-West Territory, which extends from the Ohio River to the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude.