eady
am, I should like for some gentleman, deeply skilled in the mysteries of
sacred rights, to provide himself with a microscope, and peep about, and
find out, if he can, what has become of my sacred rights. They will surely
be too small for detection with the naked eye.

Finally, I insist that if there is anything which it is the duty of the
whole people to never intrust to any hands but their own, that thing is
the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions.
And if they shall think as I do, that the extension of slavery endangers
them more than any or all other causes, how recreant to themselves if
they submit The question, and with it the fate of their country, to a mere
handful of men bent only on seif-interest. If this question of slavery
extension were an insignificant one, one having no power to do harm--it
might be shuffled aside in this way; and being, as it is, the great
Behemoth of danger, shall the strong grip of the nation be loosened upon
him, to intrust him to the hands of such feeble keepers?

I have done with this mighty argument of self-government. Go, sacred
thing! Go in peace.

But Nebraska is urged as a great Union-saving measure. Well, I too go for
saving the Union. Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the extension
of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any
great evil to avoid a greater one. But when I go to Union-saving, I must
believe, at least, that the means I employ have some adaptation to the
end. To my mind, Nebraska has no such adaptation.

"It hath no relish of salvation in it."

It is an aggravation, rather, of the only one thing which ever endangers
the Union. When it came upon us, all was peace and quiet. The nation was
looking to the forming of new bends of union, and a long course of peace
and prosperity seemed to lie before us. In the whole range of possibility,
there scarcely appears to me to have been anything out of which the
slavery agitation could have been revived, except the very project of
repealing the Missouri Compromise. Every inch of territory we owned
already had a definite settlement of the slavery question, by which all
parties were pledged to abide. Indeed, there was no uninhabited country on
the continent which we could acquire, if we except some extreme northern
regions which are wholly out of the question.

In this state of affairs the Genius of Discord himself could scarcely have
invented a way