ng in his previous
experience had prepared him to meet with entire indifference an audience
of metropolitan critics; indeed, had the surroundings been more
familiar, he had enough at stake to tax his equanimity when William
Cullen Bryant introduced him simply as "an eminent citizen of the West,
hitherto known to you only by reputation." Probably the first impression
made upon those auditors by the ungainly Westerner in his outlandish
garb were not the same which they carried home with them a little later.
The speech was so condensed that a sketch of it is not possible.
Fortunately it had the excellent quality of steadily expanding in
interest and improving to the end.

Of the Dred Scott case he cleverly said that the courts had decided it
"_in a sort of way_;" but, after all, the decision was "mainly based
upon a mistaken statement of fact,--the statement in the opinion that
'the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed
in the Constitution.'"

In closing, he begged the Republicans, in behalf of peace and harmony,
to "do nothing through passion and ill-temper;" but he immediately went
on to show the antagonism between Republican opinion and Democratic
opinion with a distinctness which left no hope of harmony, and very
little hope of peace. To satisfy the Southerners, he said, we must
"cease to call slavery _wrong_, and join them in calling it _right_. And
this must be done thoroughly,--done in _acts_ as well as in _words_....
We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We
must pull down our free-state Constitutions.... If slavery is right, all
words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong,
and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot object
to its nationality, its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly
insist upon its extension, its enlargement. All they ask we could
readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as
readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our
thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole
controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for
desiring its full recognition, as being right; but thinking it wrong, as
we do, can we yield to them?... Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet
afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the
necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we