anan was wholly without a conscience.
The thought seems never to have dawned upon him that the slave was
a man, and therefore entitled to his natural rights. In a public
speech on the ninth of July, 1860, defining his position, and
referring to the Dred Scott decision, he says: "It is to me the
most extraordinary thing in the world that this country should now
be distracted and divided because certain persons at the North will
not agree that their brethren at the South should have the same
rights in the Territories which they enjoy. What would I, as a
Pennsylvanian, say or do, supposing any one was to contend that the
Legislature of any Territory could outlaw iron or coal within the
Territory? The principle is precisely the same. The Supreme Court
of the United States has decided, what was known to us all to have
been the existing state of affairs for fifty years, that slaves
are property. Admit that fact, and you admit everything."

In this passage, as in all that he has written on the subject of
slavery, humanity is totally ignored. The right of property in
man is just as sacred to him, "as a Pennsylvanian," as the right
of property in iron or coal. He unhesitatingly accepts the Dred
Scott decision as law, which the moral sense of the nation and its
ablest jurists pronounced a nullity. Mr. Jefferson, in speaking
of slavery, said he trembled for his country, and declared that
one hour of bondage is fraught with more misery than whole ages of
our colonial oppression. Such a sentiment in the mouth of Mr.
Buchanan would have been as unnatural as a voice from the dead.
He saw nothing morally offensive in slavery, or repugnant to the
principles of Democracy. He reverenced the Constitution, but always
forgot that its compromises were agreed to in the belief that the
institution was in a state of decay, and would soon wear out its
life under the pressure of public opinion and private interest.
Throughout his public life he never faltered in his devotion to
the South, joining hands with alacrity in every measure which sought
to nationalize her sectional interest. The growing anti-slavery
opinion of the free States, which no power could prevent, and the
great moral currents of the times, which were as resistless as the
tides of the sea, had no meaning for him, because the Democracy he
believed in had no foundation in the sacredness of human rights.

Mr. Lincoln, in spite of the troubled state of the country, was