mers of our Constitution for introducing them.
They did it for the best, as they thought. They themselves hoped and
believed the necessity for such provisions would long before this time
cease to exist. They little dreamed what mighty mischiefs, what long
contentions, what bitterness, what crimes, what bloody horrors they were
entailing on their descendants. They little dreamed what a terrible
_Nemesis_ would so soon avenge the expedient and temporary introduction
(as they thought) of a contradiction to the principles of liberty into
the organic law of a free nation whose first foundations they themselves
had laid in the solemn proclamation of man's inalienable rights.

Is it too much to hope that, by and by, when there shall (as God grant)
no longer be any slavery to need protection, these Democrats will be
willing that this contradiction should be removed, by making a slight
alteration in 'the Constitution _as it is_'? Let us trust they will. It
is true the Democratic party for twenty years has had but one single
principle. Its whole life, activity, object, and occupation has centred
and turned on the one sole point of upholding slavery, echoing its
doctrines, asserting its rights, obeying its behests, extending its
area, and aggrandizing its power; and so thoroughly imbued with the
spirit of their Southern masters became the members of the party, that
in ten years past I have found but few men calling themselves Democrats
and acting with the party who were not in mind and heart, in principle
and feeling, pro-slavery men! Pro-slavery Democrats! Four-cornered
triangles! Square circles! So the sense of contradiction always struck
me. Yet for most of them I could not feel any thing of that intense
scorn with which John Randolph of Roanoke more than thirty years ago
branded the Northern 'doughface' in Congress, when pointing his skinny
finger at his sneaking victim, he exclaimed: 'Mr. Speaker, I envy
neither the head nor the heart of the Northern man who rises here to
defend slavery on principle.' I remembered the prodigiously demoralizing
effect of slavery on the moral sense and sentiments. I remembered that
the present generation of Democrats have been subjected to the influence
of Southern masters who long ago out-grew and renounced the sentiments
prevalent in the early days of John Randolph: and I have been charitable
in most cases (not in all) to their inability to see the contradiction
between the ideas of _Democracy