Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/829

 investment, and a new exodus of the European masses, aided by the preëmption principle, carry westward the advancing column of American states in one unbroken phalanx to the Pacific.

And let me ask you, what possible good has been accomplished by agitating in congress and in presidential [sic]conflcts the slavery question? Has it emancipated a single slave, or improved their condition? Has it made a single state free where slavery otherwise would have existed? Has it accelerated the disappearance of slavery from the more northern of the slaveholding states, or accomplished any practical good whatever? No, my fellow-citizens, nothing but unmitigated evil has already ensued, with disasters still more fearful impending for the future, as a consequence of this agitation.

There is a law more powerful than the legislation of man—more potent than passion or prejudice—that must ultimately determine the location of slavery in this country; it is the isothermal line; it is the law of the thermometer, of latitude or altitude, regulating climate, labor, and productions, and, as a consequence, profit and loss. Thus even upon the mountain heights of the tropics slavery can no more exist than in northern latitudes, because it is unprofitable, being unsuited to the constitution of that sable race transplanted here from the equatorial heats of Africa. Why is it that in the Union slavery recedes from the north and progresses south? It is this same great climatic law now operating for or against slavery in Kansas. If, on the elevated plains of Kansas, stretching to the base of our American alps—the Rocky mountains—and including their eastern crest, crowned with perpetual snow, from which sweep over her open prairies those chilling blasts, reducing the average range of the thermometer here to a temperature nearly as low as that of New England, should render slavery unprofitable here, because unsuited to the tropical constitution of the negro race, the law above referred to must ultimately determine that question here, and can no more be controlled by the legislation of man than any other moral or physical law of the Almighty. Especially must this law operate with irresistible force in this country, where the number of slaves is limited, and cannot be increased by importation, where many millions of acres of sugar and cotton lands are still uncultivated, and, from the ever-augmenting demand, exceeding the supply, the price of those great staples has nearly doubled, demanding vastly more slave labor for their production.

If, from the operation of these causes, slavery should not exist here, I trust it by no means follows that Kansas should become a state controlled by the treason and fanaticism of abolitionism. She has, in any event, certain constitutional duties to perform to her sister states, and especially to her immediate neighbor—the slaveholding state of Missouri. Through that great state, by rivers and railroads, must flow, to a great extent, our trade and intercourse, our imports and exports. Our entire eastern front is upon her border; from Missouri come a great number of her citizens; even the farms of the two states are cut up by the line of the state boundary, part in Kansas, part in Missouri; her citizens meet us in daily intercourse; and that Kansas should