nd
that every time, with the single exception of the Nullification question,
they sprung from an endeavor to spread this institution. There never was a
party in the history of this country, and there probably never will be, of
sufficient strength to disturb the general peace of the country. Parties
themselves may be divided and quarrel on minor questions, yet it extends
not beyond the parties themselves. But does not this question make a
disturbance outside of political circles? Does it not enter into the
churches and rend them asunder? What divided the great Methodist Church
into two parts, North and South? What has raised this constant disturbance
in every Presbyterian General Assembly that meets? What disturbed the
Unitarian Church in this very city two years ago? What has jarred and
shaken the great American Tract Society recently, not yet splitting it,
but sure to divide it in the end? Is it not this same mighty, deep-seated
power that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting and stirring
them up in every avenue of society,--in politics, in religion, in
literature, in morals, in all the manifold relations of life? Is this the
work of politicians? Is that irresistible power, which for fifty years has
shaken the government and agitated the people, to be stifled and subdued
by pretending that it is an exceedingly simple thing, and we ought not to
talk about it? If you will get everybody else to stop talking about it,
I assure you I will quit before they have half done so. But where is
the philosophy or statesmanship which assumes that you can quiet that
disturbing element in our society which has disturbed us for more than
half a century, which has been the only serious danger that has threatened
our institutions,--I say, where is the philosophy or the statesmanship
based on the assumption that we are to quit talking about it, and that the
public mind is all at once to cease being agitated by it? Yet this is the
policy here in the North that Douglas is advocating, that we are to care
nothing about it! I ask you if it is not a false philosophy. Is it not a
false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon
the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that everybody does care
the most about--a thing which all experience has shown we care a very
great deal about?

The Judge alludes very often in the course of his remarks to the exclusive
right which the States have to decide the whole thing