do for
the Louisiana territory acquired from France. No man can show a
substantial difference, except that the Kansas and Nebraska law more
clearly recognizes the right of the people to decide the question of
slavery. Again, I would ask of the men who make this cry of the
extension of slavery, to answer in candor: If the Missouri line was a
landmark for freedom, was it not also a landmark for slavery? Was not
the country south of 36 deg. 30 min., under the law of March 6th 1820,
as impliedly devoted to slavery as the country north of it was to
freedom? Up to 1848, when California, to which northern men had been
led, not more by the love of freedom than by the lust of gold, had
declared herself a Free State, had a Free State ever been made south of
the Missouri line? Was it not the almost sure result of that line to
prevent men who favor Free States from going south of it to demonstrate
by experience that Free States could grow and prosper even in a southern
clime? Had free labor a fair chance to raise its standard in the south,
and try its strength beneath a burning sun, so long as Congress had
virtually doomed the land of the south to slave labor, by declaring that
the region of free land and free labor was north of the Missouri line?
Is it not slavery rather than freedom that needs the protection of
positive law? Does the north, guarded as it is by nature's irrepealable
law, and by the self-poised and self-reliant strength of its freeborn
sons, need the Federal power to guard its soil from the feet of slaves?
Is slavery more progressive and expansive than freedom? and are the men
who form Free States afraid to meet the men who form Slave States on
common ground and take an even chance for control? In a word, do the men
who build up free institutions need any thing more from the Federal
government than that it should place in their hands the ax and the sword
of democracy, and let them alone?

It is astonishing to me that men who profess the sentiments expressed by
conservative men of the Republican party, if they are sincere in their
desire that slavery should die out, should fail to see that the
compromise of 1850 and the Kansas and Nebraska law are alike based upon
the only principle by which the ultimate extinction of slavery on this
continent must take place. All that freedom needed, and all that it
could constitutionally claim, was the withdrawal of the national
intervention in favor of slavery, which intervention