,--intend to give it no such indorsement, let no
wheedling, no sophistry, divert you from throwing a direct vote against
it.

Some men, mostly Whigs, who condemn the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
nevertheless hesitate to go for its restoration, lest they be thrown in
company with the abolitionists. Will they allow me, as an old Whig, to
tell them, good-humoredly, 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 oppose the dangerous extremes. In both you stand
on 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 a free
people--a sad evidence that, feeling 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 favor 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 blame upon the British king for having permitted its
introduction.

The royally appointed Governor of Georgia in the early 1700's was
threatened by the King with removal if he continued to oppose slavery in
his colony--at that time the King of England made a small profit on every
slave imported to the colonies. The later British criticism of the United
States for not eradicating slavery in the early 1800's, combined with
their tacit support of the 'Confederacy' during the Civil War is a prime
example of the irony and hypocrisy of politics: that self-interest will
ever overpower right.

Before the Constitution they prohibite