a halt and turn our steps backward needs all the help and good
counsels it can get; for unless popular opinion makes itself very
strongly felt, and a change is made in our present course, _blood will
flow on account of Nebraska, and brother's hand will be raised against
brother_! [The last sentence was uttered in such an earnest, impressive,
if not, indeed, tragic, manner, as to make a cold chill creep over me.
Others gave a similar experience.]

I have listened with great interest to the earnest appeal made to
Illinois men by the gentleman from Lawrence [James S. Emery] who has
just addressed us so eloquently and forcibly. I was deeply moved by his
statement of the wrongs done to free-State men out there. I think it
just to say that all true men North should sympathize with them, and
ought to be willing to do any possible and needful thing to right their
wrongs. But we must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on
to perform what we cannot; we must be calm and moderate, and consider
the whole difficulty, and determine what is possible and just. We must
not be led by excitement and passion to do that which our sober
judgments would not approve in our cooler moments. We have higher aims;
we will have more serious business than to dally with temporary
measures.

We are here to stand firmly for a principle--to stand firmly for a
right. We know that great political and moral wrongs are done, and
outrages committed, and we denounce those wrongs and outrages, although
we cannot, at present, do much more. But we desire to reach out beyond
those personal outrages and establish a rule that will apply to all, and
so prevent any future outrages.

We have seen to-day that every shade of popular opinion is represented
here, with _Freedom_ or rather _Free-Soil_ as the basis. We have come
together as in some sort representatives of popular opinion against the
extension of slavery into territory now free in fact as well as by law,
and the pledged word of the statesmen of the nation who are now no more.
We come--we are here assembled together--to protest as well as we can
against a great wrong, and to take measures, as well as we now can, to
make that wrong right; to place the nation, as far as it may be possible
now, as it was before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise; and the
plain way to do this is to restore the Compromise, and to demand and
determine that _Kansas shall be free!_ [Immense applause.] While we
affirm