fact of your making, and
not of ours. And if there be fault in that fact, that fault is primarily
yours, and remains so until you show that we repel you by, some wrong
principle or practice. If we do repel you by any wrong principle or
practice, the fault is ours; but this brings you to where you ought to
have started to a discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If
our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit
of ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are
sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then, on
the question of whether our principle, put in practice, would wrong your
section; and so meet us as if it were possible that something may be said
on our side. Do you accept the challenge? No! Then you really believe that
the principle which "our fathers who framed the Government under which we
live" thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and
again, upon their official oaths, is in fact so clearly wrong as to demand
your condemnation without a moment's consideration.

Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against sectional
parties given by Washington in his Farewell Address. Less than eight years
before Washington gave that warning, he had, as President of the United
States, approved and signed an act of Congress enforcing the prohibition
of slavery in the Northwestern Territory, which act embodied the policy of
the Government upon that subject up to, and at, the very moment he penned
that warning; and about one year after he penned it, he wrote La Fayette
that he considered that prohibition a wise measure, expressing in the same
connection his hope that we should at some time have a confederacy of free
States.

Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen upon
this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us, or
in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would he cast
the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon
you, who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington, and we
commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right
application of it.

But you say you are conservative--eminently conservative--while we
are revolutionary, destructive, or something, of the sort. What is
conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against a new and
untried? We stick to, contend for,