policy of 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
sometime 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 the new
and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the
point in controversy which was adopted by our fathers who framed the
Government under which we live; while you with one accord reject and scout
and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new.

True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be.
You have considerable variety of new propositions and plans, but you are
unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some
of you are for reviving the foreign slave-trade; some for a congressional
slave code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the
Territories to prohibit slavery within their limits; some for maintaining
slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the "gur-reat
pur-rinciple" that if one man would enslave another, no third man should
object--fantastically called "popular sovereignty." But never a man among
you in favor of prohibition of slavery in Federal Territories, according
to the practice of our fathers who framed the Government under which
we live. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an
advocate in the century within which our Government originated. And yet
you draw yourselves up and say, "We are eminently conservative."

It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great confederacy shall
be at peace, and in harmony one with another. Let us Republicans do our
part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothin