ty involved in that of national non-intervention, is
self-adjusting and of universal application; it applies to all cases and
all times, and is in itself, the only principle consistent with the
theory of the government, which is that the people of each State and
community have the right and capacity to regulate their own internal
affairs, subject only to their respective fundamental laws or
Constitutions of government and to the nation's organic law. This
principle was the basis of the compromise laws of 1850, and of the
erasure of the Missouri line in 1854, and has been endorsed by large
majorities of the people both North and South.

Now, how do the parties and candidates seeking from the people the power
to control the Federal government, stand on this great subject that
divides the nation?

I shall not presume to weary your patience by dwelling on this question.
Men who read and think with calm unbiased minds, cannot fail to see how
they stand.

I have now only to say:

1. Looking to the men who formed it, and who lead it, the platform on
which it stands, and the end which it contemplates, I regard the
organization headed by Breckinridge and Lane as essentially a sectional
slavery extension party, bound through the Federal judiciary, backed by
the Federal government, to extend slavery into all the territories of
the United States, with or without the assent of the people, and if need
be to accomplish this end, bound to legalize slavery under the Federal
Constitution in every State of the Union, and to open the floodgates of
the African slave trade under the protection of the national banner.
This is the logical end of the Breckinridge and Lane platform. Its
practical end will be the destruction of the American Union, for no man
in his senses can believe that the Federal government, either through
its President, or its Congress, or its Supreme Court, can ever make
negro slavery lawful for one hour, where the free white people of any
State will that it shall not be. If slaveholders are ever to reach the
throne of national power on this continent, which the Breckinridge party
are aiming to erect for them, they will wade to that throne through
battle fields flowing with human blood.

This Breckinridge and Lane party holds within its bosom the rankest
disunionists and most ultra advocates of the African slave trade. Its
true watch cry, whatever it may pretend in the North, is "_National
Slavery or Disunion_."

Wi