Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/623

 shall be entitled to receive each three dollars per day during their attendance at the sessions thereof, and three dollars each for every twenty miles' travel in going to and returning from said sessions, estimated according to the nearest usually traveled route.

That the legislative power of said territory shall extend to all rightful subjects of legislation, consistent with the constitution of the United States and the provisions of this act; but no law shall Ik; passed interfering with the primary disposal of the soil; no tax shall be imposed upon the property of the United States; nor shall the lands or other property of non-residents be taxed Higher than the lands or other property of residents. All the laws passed by the legislative assembly and governor shall be submitted to the congress of the United States, and, if disapproved, shall be null and of no effect.

That the constitution and laws of the United States are hereby extended over, and declared to be in force in, said territory of Utah, so far as the same, or any provision thereof, may be applicable.

The debates upon the bills in both houses were animated and interesting. Mr. Seward, of New York, touched upon the principal topics embraced in the general questions of slavery, as presented at this session, as follows:

"But it is insisted that the admission of California shall be attended by a compromise of questions which have arisen out of slavery!

I am opposed to any such compromise, in any and all the forms in which it has been proposed; because, while admitting the purity and the patriotism of all from whom it is my misfortune to differ, I think all legislative compromises, which are not absolutely necessary, radically wrong and essentially vicious. They involve the surrender of the exercise of judgment and conscience on distinct and separate questions, at distinct and separate times, with the indispensable advantages it affords for ascertaining truth. They involve a relinquishment of the right to reconsider in future the decisions of the present, on questions prematurely anticipated. And they are acts of usurpation as to future questions of the province of future legislators.

Sir, it seems to me as if slavery had laid its paralyzing hand upon myself, and the blood were coursing less freely than its wont through my veins, when I endeavor to suppose that such a compromise has been effected, and that my utterance for ever is arrested upon all the great questions — social, moral, and political — arising out of a subject so important, and yet so incomprehensible.

What am I to receive in this compromise? Freedom in California. It is well; it is a noble acquisition; it is worth a sacrifice. But what am I to give as an equivalent? A recognition of the claim to perpetuate slavery in the District of Columbia; forbearance toward more stringent laws concerning the arrest of persons suspected of being slaves found in the free states; forbearance from the proviso of freedom in the charters of new territories. None of the plans of compromise offered demand less than two, and most of them insist on all of these conditions. The equivalent, then, is some portion of liberty, some portion of human rights in one region for liberty in another region. But California brings gold and commerce as well as freedom. I am, then, to