rity and greatness
beyond all former example in the history of nations. We no sooner begin
to reason from the past to the future, than we are lost in amazement at
the prospect before us. We behold the United States, and that too at no
very distant period, the first power among the nations of the earth. But
such reasoning is not always to be relied on. Whether, in the present
instance, it points to a reality, or to a magnificent dream merely, will
of course depend on the wisdom, the integrity, and the moderation, of
our rulers.

It cannot be disguised that the Union, with all its unspeakable
advantages and blessings, is in danger. It is the Fugitive Slave Law
against which the waves of abolitionism have dashed with their utmost
force and raged with an almost boundless fury. On the other hand, it is
precisely the Fugitive Slave Law--that great constitutional guarantee of
our rights--which the people of the South are, as one man, the most
inflexibly determined to maintain. We are prepared, and we shall
accordingly proceed, to show that, in this fearful conflict, the great
leaders of abolitionism--the Chases, the Sewards, and the Sumners, of
the day--are waging a fierce, bitter, and relentless warfare against the
Constitution of their country.

Sec. I. _Mr. Seward's attack on the Constitution of his country._

There is one thing which Mr. Seward's reasoning overlooks,--namely, that
he has taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States.
We shall not lose sight of this fact, nor permit him to obscure it by
his special pleadings and mystifications; since it serves to show that
while, in the name of a "higher law," he denounces the Constitution of
his country, he at the same time commits a most flagrant outrage against
that higher law itself.

The clause of the Constitution which Mr. Seward denounces is as follows:
"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws
thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or
regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall
be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may
be due." This clause, as Mr. Seward contemptuously says, is "from the
Constitution of the United States in 1787." He knows of only one other
compact like this "in diplomatic history;" and that was made between
despotic powers "in the year of grace 902, in the period called the Dark
Ages." But whether this compact made by th