Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/660

 shuffling of the balance between the free states and the slave states, tell me what chances this new law that you are passing will have? You are, moreover, setting a precedent which abrogates all compromises. Four years ago you obtained the consent of a portion of the free [sic]tates—enough to render the effort at immediate repeal or resistance alike impossible—to what we regard as an unconstitutional act for the surrender of fugitive slaves. That was declared by the common consent of the persons acting in the name of the two parties, the slave states and the free states in congress, an irrepealable law—not even to be questioned, although it violated the constitution. In establishing this new principle, you expose that law also to the chances of repeal. You not only so expose the fugitive slave law, but there is no solemnity about the articles for the annexation of Texas to the United states, which does not hang about the Missouri compromise, and when you have shown that the Missouri compromise can be repealed, then the articles for the annexation of Texas are subject to the will and pleasure and the caprice of a temporary majority in congress. Do you, then, expect that the free states are to observe compacts, and you to be at liberty to break them; that they are to submit to laws and leave them on the statute-book, however unconstitutional and however grievous, and that you are to rest under no such obligation? I think it is not a reasonable expectation. Say, then, who from the north will be bound to admit Kansas, when Kansas shall come in here, if she shall come as a slave state? The honorable senator from Georgia (Mr. Toombs)—and I know he is as sincere as he is ardent—says if he shall be here when Kansas comes as a free state, he will vote for her admission. I doubt not that he would; but he will not be here, for the very reason, if there be no other, that he would vote that way. When Oregon or Minnesota shall come here for admission—within one year, or two years, or three years from this time—we shall then see what your new principle is worth in its obligation upon the slaveholding stages. No; you establish no principle, you only abrogate a principle which was established for your own security as well as ours; and while you think you are abnegating and resigning all power and all authority on this subject into the hands of the people of the territories, you are only getting over a difficulty in settling this question in the organization of two new territories, by postponing it till they come here to be admitted as states, slave or free. Sir, in saying that your new principle will not be established by this bill, I reason from obvious, clear, well-settled principles of human nature. Slavery and freedom are antagonistical elements of this country. The founders of the constitution framed it with a knowledge of that antagonism, and suffered it to continue, that it might work out its own ends. There is a commercial antagonism, an irreconcilable one, between the systems of free labor and slave labor. They have been at war with each other ever since the government was established, and that war is to continue forever. The contest, when it ripens between these two antagonistic elements, is to be settled somewhere; it is to be settled in the seat of central power, in the federal legislature The