on? Is the law of the Kansas
and Nebraska act, annulling the Missouri compromise line, a different
law from what it was in 1856, when it was triumphantly sustained against
Fremont and the Philadelphia platform? No man can say the laws are not
the same. As they were then, so are they now. If right in principle and
good then, they are equally right and good now. Were the people
senseless or did they mean nothing when they endorsed those laws? No man
dare say that. Why is it then that the Democratic party, which triumphed
in 1852 and in 1856 on these very measures, is now a divided and broken
army and almost panic-stricken, and its opponents, the advocates of
Congressional prohibition of slavery, with a man at their head without a
record as a statesman and almost unknown to the nation, carrying in
their train all the fiercest elements of anti-slavery agitation, are
already boasting of sure success? No satisfactory answer can be given to
these questions, except the fact that the administration of James
Buchanan, false to the principles on which it was placed in power, has
attempted by intervention in favor of slavery, to destroy the very
principle which is the life of the compromise of 1850 and of the Kansas
and Nebraska law of 1854. Those great measures and their ablest and most
consistent champion, have alike been stabbed in the house of their
friends. By the course of the Buchanan administration, the people of the
North have been made to believe that the principle of non-intervention
is a sham; that the compromise of 1850 and the erasure of the Missouri
line in 1852 were fraudulent schemes to cheat the people into a consent
to extend slavery all over the national territory; and the cry is echoed
all through the North: the nation's plighted faith is broken, the
landmarks of freedom are removed, the barbarism of slavery will spread
over the land! Is there reason in this cry, for argument it cannot be
called? There is none. Why the very fact that the acts of the Federal
executive have had power to produce this strange delusion and wild
commotion of the public mind, is itself a potent argument for holding
fast to the principle of the compromise of 1850, and rallying the people
again to its support, so that the President and the Congress may no
longer disturb the people by tampering with the local question of
slavery. Again I say, there is nothing in this cry of the extension of
the barbarism of slavery; it is as senseless as i