c spirit of resistance
is inevitable from the constitution of man and the character of
God. The sporadic cases of protest and of resistance to the
slaveholding aristocracy, which lift themselves occasionally above the
dead level of the surrounding despotism, are representative
cases. They stand for much more than their single selves. They prove
that there is a wide-spread spirit of discontent, informing great
regions of the slave-land, which must one day find or force an
opportunity of making itself heard and felt. This we have just seen in
the great movement in Missouri, the very nursing-mother of
Border-Ruffianism itself, which narrowly missed making Emancipation
the policy of the majority of the voters there. Such a result is the
product of no sudden culture. It must have been long and slowly
growing up. And how could it be otherwise? There must be intelligence
enough among the non-slaveholding whites to see the difference there
is between themselves and persons of the same condition in the Free
States. Why can they have no free schools? Why is it necessary that a
missionary society be formed at the North to furnish them with such
ministers as the slave-master can approve? Why can they not support
their own ministers, and have a Gospel of Free Labor preached to them,
if they choose? Why are they hindered from taking such newspapers as
they please? Why are they subjected to a censorship of the press,
which dictates to them what they may or may not read, and which
punishes booksellers with exile and ruin for keeping for sale what
they want to buy? Why must Northern publishers expurgate and
emasculate the literature of the world before it is permitted to reach
them? Why is it that the value of acres increases in a geometrical
ratio, as they stretch away towards the North Star from the frontier
of Slavery? These questions must suggest their sufficient answer to
thousands of hearts, and be preparing the way for the insurrection of
which the slaveholders stand in the deadliest fear,--that of the
whites at their gates, who can do with them and their institutions
what seems to them good, when once they know their power, and choose
to put it forth. The unity of interest of the non-slaveholders of the
South with the people of the Free States is perfect, and it must one
day combine them in a unity of action.

The exact time when the millions of the North and of the South shall
rise upon this puny mastership, and snatch from it