me wrong principle or practice. If we
ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have started--to a
discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If our principle, put
in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of ours, or for any
other object, then our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are
justly opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then, on the question of
whether our principle put in practice would wrong your section; and so
meet it as if it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do
you accept the challenge? No? Then you really believe that the principle
which our fathers who framed the Government under which we live thought so
clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, upon their
official oaths, is in fact so clearly wrong as to demand our condemnation
without a moment's consideration. Some of you delight to flaunt in our
faces the warning against sectional parties given by Washington in his
Farewell Address. Less than eight years before Washington gave that
warning, he had, as President of the United States, approved and signed an
act of Congress enforcing the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern
Territory, which act embodied the policy of government upon that subject,
up to and at the very moment he penned that warning; and about one year
after he penned it he wrote La Fayette that he considered that prohibition
a wise measure, expressing in the same connection his hope that we should
sometime have a confederacy of free States.

Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen upon
this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us, or
in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would he cast
the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon
you, who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington, and we
commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right
application of it.

But you say you are conservative--eminently conservative--while we
are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is
conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new
and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the
point in controversy which was adopted by our fathers who framed the
Government under which we live; while you with one accord reject and scout
and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting s