Though he
may not be much of a logician, yet, it must be admitted, he is "skillful
of fence." We should do him great injustice as an antagonist, at least
before the tribunal of human passion, if we should suppose that it is
merely for the abstract glory of setting up a man of straw, and then
knocking it down, that he has mustered all the powers of his logic and
unfurled all the splendors of his rhetoric. He has a design in all this,
which we shall now proceed to expose.

Here are two distinct questions. First, Is slavery a national
institution? Secondly, Has Congress the power to pass a Fugitive Slave
Law? These two questions are, we repeat, perfectly distinct; and hence,
if Mr. Sumner wished to discuss them fairly and honestly, he should have
argued each one by itself. We agree with him in regard to the first; we
dissent _toto coelo_ from him in regard to the last. But he has not
chosen to keep them separate, or to discuss each one by itself. On the
contrary, he has, as we have seen, connected them together as premiss
and conclusion, and he keeps them together through the first portion of
his speech. Most assuredly Mr. Sumner knows that one of the very best
ways in the world to cause a truth or proposition to be rejected is to
bind it up with a manifest error or absurdity. Yet the proposition for
which we contend--that Congress has the power to support slavery by the
passage of a Fugitive Slave Law--is bound up by him with the monstrous
absurdity that "slavery is a national institution;" and both are
denounced together as if both were equally absurd. One instance, out of
many, of this unfair mode of proceeding, we shall now lay before our
readers.

"The Constitution contains no power," says he, "to make a king or to
support kingly rule. With similar reason it may be said that it contains
no power to make a slave, or to support a system of slavery. The absence
of all such power is hardly more clear in one case than in the other.
But, if there be no such power, all national legislation upholding
slavery must be unconstitutional and void."

Thus covertly, and in company with the supposed power of Congress to
make slaves or to institute slavery, Mr. Sumner denounces the power of
Congress to enact a Fugitive Slave Law! He not only denounces it, but
treats it as absurd in the extreme; just as absurd, indeed, as it would
be to assert that Congress had power "to support kingly rule!" We can
listen to the arguments of Mr. S