deny it. That makes an issue; and the
burden of proof is upon you. You produce your proof; and what is it?
Why, that our party has no existence in your section--gets no votes in
your section. The fact is substantially true; but does it prove the
issue? If it does, then in case we should, without change of
principle, begin to get votes in your section, we should thereby cease
to be sectional. You cannot escape this conclusion; and yet, are you
willing to abide by it? If you are, you will probably soon find that
we have ceased to be sectional, for we shall get votes in your section
this very year. You will then begin to discover, as the truth plainly
is, that your proof does not touch the issue. The fact that we get no
votes in your section is a fact of your making, and not of ours. And
if there be fault in that fact, that fault is primarily yours, and
remains so until you show that we repel you by some wrong principle or
practice. If we do repel you by any wrong principle or practice, the
fault is ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have
started--to discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If our
principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of
ours, or for any other object, then 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