c Institution, they do not require us to
forget that we have institutions of our own, worth maintaining and
extending, and not without a certain sacredness, whether we regard the
traditions of the fathers or the faith of the children. It is high
time that we should hear something of the rights of the Free States,
and of the duties consequent upon them. We also have our prejudices to
be respected, our theory of civilization, of what constitutes the
safety of a state and insures its prosperity, to be applied wherever
there is soil enough for a human being to stand on and thank God for
making him a man. Is conservatism applicable only to property, and not
to justice, freedom, and public honor? Does it mean merely drifting
with the current of evil times and pernicious counsels, and carefully
nursing the ills we have, that they may, as their nature it is, grow
worse?

To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when
it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with
the fever and ague on him to stop shaking and he will be cured. The
discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what?
The manufacturers of the Free States constitute a more numerous class
than the slaveholders of the South: suppose they should claim an equal
sanctity for the Protective System. Discussion is the very life of
free institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral
enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed.
The Swiss guide enjoins silence in the region of avalanches, lest the
mere vibration of the voice should dislodge the ruin clinging by frail
roots of snow. But where is our avalanche to fall? It is to overwhelm
the Union, we are told. The real danger to the Union will come when
the encroachments of the Slave-Power and the concessions of the
Trade-Power shall have made it a burden instead of a blessing. The
real avalanche to be dreaded, are we to expect it from the
ever-gathering mass of ignorant brute force, with the irresponsibility
of animals and the passions of men, which is one of the fatal
necessities of slavery, or from the gradually increasing consciousness
of the non-slaveholding population of the Slave States of the true
cause of their material impoverishment and political inferiority? From
one or the other source its ruinous forces will be fed, but in either
event it is not the Union that will be imperilled, but the privileged
Order who on e