in every other aspect it is infinite, inasmuch as it
makes the Constitution a well-spring of insupportable thralldom, and
once more lifts the sluices of blood destined to run until it comes to
the horse's bridle. Adopt it, and you will put millions of
fellow-citizens under the ban of excommunication; you will hand them
over to a new anathema maranatha; you will declare that they have no
political rights 'which white men are bound to respect,' thus
repeating in a new form that abomination which has blackened the name
of Taney. Adopt it, and you will stimulate anew the war of race upon
race. Slavery itself was a war of race upon race, and this is only a
new form of this terrible war. The proposition is as hardy as it is
gigantic; for it takes no account of the moral sense of mankind, which
is the same as if in rearing a monument we took no account of the law
of gravitation. It is the paragon and masterpiece of ingratitude,
showing more than any other act of history what is so often charged
and we so fondly deny, that republics are ungrateful. The freedmen ask
for bread, and you send them a stone. With piteous voice they ask for
protection. You thrust them back unprotected into the cruel den of
their former masters. Such an attempt, thus bad as bad can be, thus
abortive for all good, thus perilous, thus pregnant with a war of race
upon race, thus shocking to the moral sense, and thus treacherous to
those whom we are bound to protect, can not be otherwise than
shameful. Adopt it, and you will cover the country with dishonor.
Adopt it, and you will fix a stigma upon the very name of republic. As
to the imagination, there are mountains of light, so are there
mountains of darkness; and this is one of them. It is the very
Koh-i-noor of blackness. Adopt this proposition, and you will be
little better than the foul Harpies who defiled the feast that was
spread. The Constitution is the feast spread for our country, and you
are now hurrying to drop into its text a political obscenity, and to
spread on its page a disgusting ordure,

"'Defiling all you find,
And parting leave a loathsome stench behind.'"

Having presented his objections to the pending proposition, at great
length, he summed them up as follows: "You have seen, first, how this
proposition carries into the Constitution itself the idea of
Inequality of Rights, thus defiling that unspotted text; secondly, how
it is an express sanction of the acknow