Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/658

 slavery-fearing citizens. Come on, then, gentlemen of the slave states. Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause or freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.

There are, however, earnest advocates of this bill, who do not expect, and who, I suppose, do not desire that slavery shall gain possession of Nebraska. What do they expect to gain? The honorable senator from Indiana (Mr. Pettit) says that by thus obliterating the Missouri compromise restriction, they will gain a tabula rasa, on which the inhabitants of Kansas and Nebraska may write whatever they will. This is the great principle of the bill, as he understands it. Well, what gain is there in that? You obliterate a constitution of freedom. If they write a new constitution of freedom, can the new be better than the old? If they write a constitution of slavery, will it not be a worse one? I ask the honorable senator that. But the honorable senator says that the people of Nebraska will have the privilege of establishing institutions for themselves. They have now the privilege of establishing free institutions. Is it a privilege, then, to establish slavery? If so, what a mockery are all our constitutions, which prevent the inhabitants from capriciously subverting free institutions and establishing institutions of slavery! Sir, it is a sophism, a subtlety, to talk of conferring upon a country, already secure in the blessings of freedom, the power of self-destruction.

What mankind everywhere want, is not the removal of the constitutions of freedom which they have, that they may make at their pleasure constitutions of slavery or freedom, but the privilege of retaining constitutions of freedom when they already have them, and the removal of constitutions of slavery when they have them, that they may establish constitutions of freedom in their place. We hold on tenaciously to all existing constitutions of freedom. Who denounces any man for diligently adhering to such constitutions? Who would dare to denounce any one for disloyalty to our existing constitutions, if they were constitutions of despotism and slavery? But it is supposed by some that this principle is less important in regard to Kansas and Nebraska than as a general one — a general principle applicable to all other present and future territories of the United States. Do honorable senators then indeed suppose they are establishing a principle at all? If so, I think they egregiously err, whether the principle is either good or bad, right or wrong. They are not establishing it, and cannot establish it in this way. You subvert one law capriciously by making another law in its place. That is all. Will your law have any more weight, authority, solemnity, or binding force on future congresses than the first had? You abrogate the law of your predecessors — others will have equal power and equal liberty to abrogate yours. You allow no barriers around the old law, to protect it from abrogation. You erect none around your new law, to stay the hand of future innovators.

On what ground do you expect the new law to stand? If you are candid, you will confess that you rest your assumptions on the ground that the free states will never agitate repeal, but always acquiesce. It may be that you