e that any of them would
abolish human nature as that Mr. Lincoln would abolish slavery. The
same generous instinct that leads some among us to sympathize with the
sorrows of the bereaved master will always, we fear, influence others
to take part with the rescued man.

But if our Constitutional Obligations, as we like to call our
constitutional timidity or indifference, teach us that a particular
divinity hedges the Domestic Institution, they do not require us to
forget that we have institutions of our own, worth maintaining and
extending, and not without a certain sacredness, whether we regard the
traditions of the fathers or the faith of the children. It is high time
that we should hear something of the rights of the Free States, and of
the duties consequent upon them. We also have our prejudices to be
respected, our theory of civilization, of what constitutes the safety
of a state and insures its prosperity, to be applied wherever there is
soil enough for a human being to stand on and thank God for making him
a man. Is conservatism applicable only to property, and not to justice,
freedom, and public honor? Does it mean merely drifting with the
current of evil times and pernicious counsels, and carefully nursing
the ills we have, that they may, as their nature it is, grow worse?

To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when
it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with
the fever and ague on him to stop shaking, and he will be cured. The
discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what?
The manufacturers of the Free States constitute a more numerous class
than the slaveholders of the South: suppose they should claim an equal
sanctity for the Protective System. Discussion is the very life of free
institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral
enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed.
The Swiss guide enjoins silence in the region of avalanches, lest the
mere vibration of the voice should dislodge the ruin clinging by frail
roots of snow. But where is our avalanche to fall? It is to overwhelm
the Union, we are told. The real danger to the Union will come when the
encroachments of the Slave-Power and the concessions of the Trade-Power
shall have made it a burden instead of a blessing. The real avalanche
to be dreaded,--are we to expect it from the ever-gathering mass of
ignorant brute force, with the irresponsibil