cians--to be bound still more
rigorously, or unloosed, as may seem well in their discretion.

Who can doubt that, as a nation, we should have been more honorable and
influential abroad--more prosperous and united at home--if Kentucky, at
the very outset of this matter, had been refused admission to the Union
until she had expunged from her Constitution the covenant with
oppression? She would not have remained out of the Union a single year
on that account. If the worship of Liberty had not been exchanged for
that of Power--if her principles had been successfully maintained in
this first assault, their triumph in every other would have been easy.
We should not have had a state less in the confederacy, and slavery
would have been seen, at this time, shrunk up to the most contemptible
dimensions, if it had not vanished entirely away. But we have furnished
another instance to be added to the long and melancholy list already
existing, to prove that,--

"facilis descensus Averni,
Sed revocare gradum
Hoc opus hic labor est,"

if _poetry_ is not _fiction_.

Success in the Missouri struggle--late as it was--would have placed the
cause of freedom in our country out of the reach of danger from its
inexorable foe. The principles of liberty would have struck deeper root
in the free states, and have derived fresh vigor from such a triumph. If
these principles had been honored by the government from that period to
the present, (as they would have been, had the free states, even then,
assumed their just preponderance in its administration,) we should now
have, in Missouri herself, a healthful and vigorous ally in the cause of
freedom; and, in Arkansas, a free people--_twice_ her present
numbers--pressing on the confines of slavery, and summoning the keepers
of the southern charnel-house to open its doors, that its inmates might
walk forth, in a glorious resurrection to liberty and life. Although
young, as a people, we should be, among the nations, venerable for our
virtue; and we should exercise an influence on the civilized and
commercial world that we most despair of possessing, as long as we
remain vulnerable to every shaft that malice, or satire, or philanthropy
may find it convenient to hurl against us.[A]

[Footnote A: A comic piece--the production of one of the most popular of
the French writers in his way--had possession of the Paris stage last
winter. When one of the personages SEPARA