e men-stealers_, MERCILESS TYRANTS, BLOOD
THIRSTY ASSASSINS, who legislate with deadly weapons about their
persons, such as pistols, daggers, and bowie-knives, with which they
threaten to murder any Northern senator or representative who shall
dare to stain their _honor_, or interfere with their _rights_! They
constitute a banditti more fierce and cruel than any whose atrocities
are recorded on the pages of history or romance. To mix with them on
terms of social or religious fellowship, is to indicate a low state of
virtue; but to think of administering a free government by their
co-operation, is nothing short of insanity.

Article IV., Section 2, declares,--"no person held to service or labor
on 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."

Here is a third clause, which, like the other two, makes no mention of
slavery or slaves, in express terms; and yet, like them, was
intelligently framed and mutually understood by the parties to the
ratification, and intended both to protect the slave system and to
restore runaway slaves. It alone makes slavery a national institution,
a national crime, and all the people who are not enslaved, the
body-guard over those whose liberties have been cloven down. This
agreement, too, has been fulfilled to the letter by the North.

Under the Mosaic dispensation it was imperatively commanded,--"Thou
shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from
his master unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in
that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh
him best: thou shalt not oppress him." The warning which the prophet
Isaiah gave to oppressing Moab was of a similar kind: "Take counsel,
execute judgment; make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the
noon-day; hide the outcasts; bewray not him that wandereth. Let mine
outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a covert to them from the face
of the spoiler." The prophet Obadiah brings the following charge
against treacherous Edom, which is precisely applicable to this guilty
nation:--"For thy violence against thy brother Jacob, shame shall come
over thee, and thou shalt be cut off for ever. In the day that thou
stoodest on the other side, in the day that the strangers carried away
captive hi