hey
be thrown in company with the Abolitionists. Will they allow me, as an
old Whig, to tell them good-humouredly that I think this is very silly?
Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right,
and part with him when he goes wrong. Stand with the Abolitionist in
restoring the Missouri Compromise, and stand against him when he
attempts to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law. In the latter case you stand
with the Southern disunionist. What of that? You are still right. In
both cases you are right In both cases you expose the dangerous
extremes. In both you stand on the middle ground and hold the ship level
and steady. In both you are national, and nothing less than national.
This is the good old Whig ground. To desert such ground because of any
company is to be less than a Whig, less than a man, less than an
American.

I particularly object to the new position which the avowed principle of
this Nebraska law gives to slavery in the body politic. I object to it
because it assumes that there can be moral right in the enslaving of one
man by another. I object to it as a dangerous dalliance for free
people--a sad evidence that, feeling over-prosperity, we forget right;
that liberty as a principle we have ceased to revere. I object to it
because the Fathers of the Republic eschewed and rejected it. The
argument of "necessity" was the only argument they ever admitted in
favour of slavery, and so far, and so far only as it carried them, did
they ever go. They found the institution existing among us, which they
could not help, and they cast the blame on the British king for having
permitted its introduction. Thus we see the plain, unmistakable spirit
of their age towards slavery was hostility to the principle, and
toleration only by necessity.

But now it is to be transformed into a _sacred right_.... Henceforth it
is to be the chief jewel of the nation,--the very figure-head of the
ship of State. Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the
grave, we have been giving up the old for the new faith. Near eighty
years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now
from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for
some men to enslave others is a sacred right of self-government. These
principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and
Mammon; and whoever holds to the one must despise the other....

Our Republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust