tutional mandate is this which can thus be made
to bend and truckle and compromise as if it were a simple rule of
expediency that might admit of exceptions upon motives of countervailing
expediency. There can be no such pliancy in the peremptory provisions of
the Constitution. They cannot be obeyed by moieties and violated in the
same ratio. They must be followed out to their full extent, or treated
with that decent neglect which has at least the merit of forbearing to
render contumacy obtrusive by an ostentatious display of the very duty
which we in part abandon. If the decalogue could be observed in this
casuistical manner, we might be grievous sinners, and yet be liable to
no reproach. We might persist in all our habitual irregularities,
and still be spotless. We might, for example, continue to covet our
neighbors' goods, provided they were the same neighbors whose goods we
had before coveted--and so of all the other commandments.

Will the gentlemen tell us that it is the quantity of slaves, not the
quality of slavery, which takes from a government the republican
form? Will they tell us (for they have not yet told us) that there are
constitutional grounds (to say nothing of common sense) upon which the
slavery which now exists in Missouri may be reconciled with a republican
form of government, while any addition to the number of its slaves (the
quality of slavery remaining the same) from the other States, will
be repugnant to that form, and metamorphose it into some nondescript
government disowned by the Constitution? They cannot have recourse to
the treaty of 1803 for such a distinction, since independently of what I
have before observed on that head, the gentlemen have contended that the
treaty has nothing to do with the matter.

They have cut themselves off from all chance of a convenient distinction
in or out of that treaty, by insisting that slavery beyond the old
United States is rejected by the Constitution, and by the law of God
as discoverable by the aid of either reason or revelation; and moreover
that the treaty does not include the case, and if it did could not make
it better. They have, therefore, completely discredited their own theory
by their own practice, and left us no theory worthy of being seriously
controverted. This peculiarity in reasoning of giving out a universal
principle, and coupling with it a practical concession that it is wholly
fallacious, has indeed run through the greater part of th