"; while at
the birthplace of freedom--in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of the "cradle
of liberty," at the home of the Adamses and Warren and Otis--Choate,
from our side of the house, dares to fritter away the birthday promise
of liberty by proclaiming the Declaration to be "a string of glittering
generalities"; and the Southern Whigs, working hand in hand with
proslavery Democrats, are making Choate's theories practical. Thomas
Jefferson, a slaveholder, mindful of the moral element in slavery,
solemnly declared that he trembled for his country when he remembered that
God is just; while Judge Douglas, with an insignificant wave of the hand,
"don't care whether slavery is voted up or voted down." Now, if slavery
is right, or even negative, he has a right to treat it in this trifling
manner. But if it is a moral and political wrong, as all Christendom
considers it to be, how can he answer to God for this attempt to spread
and fortify it? [Applause.]

But no man, and Judge Douglas no more than any other, can maintain a
negative, or merely neutral, position on this question; and, accordingly,
he avows that the Union was made by white men and for white men and their
descendants. As matter of fact, the first branch of the proposition is
historically true; the government was made by white men, and they were
and are the superior race. This I admit. But the corner-stone of the
government, so to speak, was the declaration that "all men are created
equal," and all entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
[Applause.]

And not only so, but the framers of the Constitution were particular
to keep out of that instrument the word "slave," the reason being that
slavery would ultimately come to an end, and they did not wish to have any
reminder that in this free country human beings were ever prostituted to
slavery. [Applause.] Nor is it any argument that we are superior and the
negro inferior--that he has but one talent while we have ten. Let the
negro possess the little he has in independence; if he has but one talent,
he should be permitted to keep the little he has. [Applause:] But slavery
will endure no test of reason or logic; and yet its advocates, like
Douglas, use a sort of bastard logic, or noisy assumption it might better
be termed, like the above, in order to prepare the mind for the gradual,
but none the less certain, encroachments of the Moloch of slavery upon the
fair domain of freedom. But however much y