ated, or howsoever seductive or alluring in their
aspect.'

* * * * *

Sir, it was but the other day that we were forbidden, (properly
forbidden I am sure, for the prohibition came from you,) to assume that
there existed any intention to impose a prospective restraint on
the domestic legislation of Missouri--a restraint to act upon it
contemporaneously with its origin as a State, and to continue adhesive
to it through all the stages of its political existence. We are now,
however, permitted to know that it is determined by a sort of political
surgery to amputate one of the limbs of its local sovereignty, and thus
mangled and disparaged, and thus only, to receive it into the bosom of
the Constitution. It is now avowed that, while Maine is to be ushered
into the Union with every possible demonstration of studious reverence
on our part, and on hers, with colors flying, and all the other graceful
accompaniments of honorable triumph, this ill-conditioned upstart of the
West, this obscure foundling of a wilderness that was but yesterday
the hunting-ground of the savage, is to find her way into the American
family as she can, with an humiliating badge of remediless inferiority
patched upon her garments, with the mark of recent, qualified
manumission upon her, or rather with a brand upon her forehead to tell
the stogy of her territorial vassalage, and to perpetuate the memory of
her evil propensities. It is now avowed that, while the robust district
of Maine is to be seated by the side of her truly respectable parent,
co-ordinate in authority and honor, and is to be dandled into that power
and dignity of which she does not stand in need, but which undoubtedly
she deserves, the more infantine and feeble Missouri is to be repelled
with harshness, and forbidden to come at all, unless with the iron
collar of servitude about her neck, instead of the civic crown of
republican freedom upon her brows, and is to be doomed forever to
leading-strings, unless she will exchange those leading-strings for
shackles.

I am told that you have the power to establish this odious and revolting
distinction, and I am referred for the proofs of that power to various
parts of the Constitution, but principally to that part of it which
authorizes the admission of new States into the Union. I am myself
of opinion that it is in that part only that the advocates for this
restriction can, with any hope of success, apply for a license