Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/657

 the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, hut within all the other present and future territories of the United States. Thus it it is quite clear that it U Dot a principle alone that is involved, hut that those who crowd this measure with so much zeal and earnestness must expect that either freedom or slavery shall gain something' by it in those regions. The case, then, stands thus in Kansas and Nebraska: freedom may lose, but certainly can gain nothing; while slavery may gain, but as certainly can lose nothing.

So far as I am concerned, the time for looking on the dark side has passed. I feel quite sure that slavery at most can get nothing more than Kansas; while Nebraska — the wider northern region — will, under existing circumstances, escape, for the reason that its soil and climate are uncongenial with the staples of slave culture — rice, sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Moreover, since the public attention has been so well and so effectually directed toward the subject, I cherish a hope that slavery may be prevented even from gaining a foothold in Kansas. Congress only gives consent, but it does not and cannot introduce slavery there. Slavery will be embarrassed by its own overgrasping spirit. No one, I am sure, anticipates the possible reestablishment of the African slave-trade. The tide of emigration to Kansas is therefore to be supplied there solely by the domestic fountain of slave production. But slavery has also other regions besides Kansas to be filled from that fountain. There are all of New Mexico and all of Utah already within the United States; and then there is Cuba that consumes slave labor and life as fast as any one of the slaveholding states can supply it; and besides these regions, there remains all of Mexico down to the Isthmus. The stream of slave labor flowing from so small a fountain, and broken into several divergent channels, will not cover so great a field; and it is reasonably to be hoped that the part of it nearest to the North Pole will be the last to be inundated. But African slave emigration is to compete with free emigration of white men, and the source of this latter tide is as ample as the civilization of the two entire continents. The honorable senator from Delaware mentioned, as if it were a startling fact, that twenty thousand European immigrants arrived in New York in one month. Sir, he has stated the fact with too much moderation. On my return to the capital a day or two ago, I met twelve thousand of these emigrants who had arrived in New York on one morning, and who had thronged the churches on the following Sabbath, to return thanks for deliverence from the perils of the sea, and for their arrival in the land, not of slavery, but of liberty. I also thank God for their escape, and for their coming. They are now on their way westward, and the news of the passage of this bill preceding them, will speed many of them towards Kansas and Nebraska. Such arrivals are not extraordinary — they occur almost every week; and the immigration from Germany, from Great [sic]Britian, and from Norway, and from Sweden, during the European war, will rise to six or seven hundred thousand souls in a year. And with this tide is to be mingled one rapidly swelling from Asia and from the islands of the south seas. All the immigrants under this bill, as the house of representatives overruling you have ordered, will be good, loyal, liberty-loving,