avery pressed
entirely up to the old western boundary of the State, and when rather
recently a part of that boundary at the northwest was moved out a little
farther west, slavery followed on quite up to the new line. Now, when the
restriction is removed, what is to prevent it from going still farther?
Climate will not, no peculiarity of the country will, nothing in nature
will. Will the disposition of the people prevent it? Those nearest the
scene are all in favor of the extension. The Yankees who are opposed to it
may be most flumerous; but, in military phrase, the battlefield is too far
from their base of operations.

But it is said there now is no law in Nebraska on the subject of slavery,
and that, in such case, taking a slave there operates his freedom. That is
good book-law, but it is not the rule of actual practice. Wherever slavery
is it has been first introduced without law. The oldest laws we find
concerning it are not laws introducing it, but regulating it as an already
existing thing. A white man takes his slave to Nebraska now. Who will
inform the negro that he is free? Who will take him before court to test
the question of his freedom? In ignorance of his legal emancipation he is
kept chopping, splitting, and plowing. Others are brought, and move on in
the same track. At last, if ever the time for voting comes on the question
of slavery the institution already, in fact, exists in the country, and
cannot well be removed. The fact of its presence, and the difficulty of
its removal, will carry the vote in its favor. Keep it out until a vote is
taken, and a vote in favor of it cannot be got in any population of forty
thousand on earth, who have been drawn together by the ordinary motives of
emigration and settlement. To get slaves into the Territory simultaneously
with the whites in the incipient stages of settlement is the precise stake
played for and won in this Nebraska measure.

The question is asked us: "If slaves will go in notwithstanding the
general principle of law liberates them, why would they not equally go in
against positive statute law--go in, even if the Missouri restriction were
maintained!" I answer, because it takes a much bolder man to venture
in with his property in the latter case than in the former; because the
positive Congressional enactment is known to and respected by all, or
nearly all, whereas the negative principle that no law is free law is not
much known except among lawyers. We