en our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are justly
opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then, on the question of
whether our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section;
and so meet us as if it were possible that something may be said on
our side. Do you accept the challenge? No! Then you really believe
that the principle which "our fathers who framed the Government
under which we live" thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and
indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is in fact so
clearly wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment's
consideration.

Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against
sectional parties given by Washington in his Farewell Address. Less
than eight years before Washington gave that warning, he had, as
President of the United States, approved and signed an act of
Congress, enforcing the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern
Territory, which act embodied the policy of the Government upon that
subject up to and at the very moment he penned that warning; and
about one year after he penned it, he wrote Lafayette that he
considered that prohibition a wise measure, expressing in the same
connection his hope that we should at some time have a confederacy
of free States.[28]

Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen
upon this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands
against us, or in our hands against you? Could Washington himself
speak, would he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who
sustain his policy, or upon you who repudiate it? We respect that
warning of Washington, and we commend it to you, together with his
example pointing to the right application of it.

But you say you are conservative--eminently conservative--while we
are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is
conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the
new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy
on the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who
framed the Government under which we live"; while you with one
accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist
upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves
as to what that substitute shall be. You are divid