about their persons, such as pistols, daggers, and bowie-knives,
with which they threaten to murder any Northern senator or
representative who shall dare to stain their _honor_, or interfere
with their _rights_! They constitute a banditti more fierce and cruel
than any whose atrocities are recorded on the pages of history or
romance. To mix with them on terms of social or religious fellowship,
is to indicate a low state of virtue; but to think of administering
a free government by their co-operation, is nothing short of insanity.

Article IV., Section 2, declares,--"No person held to service or
labor in one State, _under the laws thereof_, escaping into another,
shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be
discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on
claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

Here is a third clause, which, like the other two, makes no mention
of slavery or slaves, in express terms; and yet, like them, was
intelligently framed and mutually understood by the parties to the
ratification, and intended both to protect the slave system and to
restore runaway slaves. It alone makes slavery a national institution,
a national crime, and all the people who are not enslaved, the
body-guard over those whose liberties have been cloven down. This
agreement, too, has been fulfilled to the letter by the North.

Under the Mosaic dispensation it was imperatively commanded,--"Thou
shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped
from his master unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, even among you,
in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it
liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him." The warning which the
prophet Isaiah gave to oppressing Moab was of a similar kind:
"Take counsel, execute judgment; make thy shadow as the night in the
midst of the noon-day; hide the outcasts; bewray not him that
wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a covert
to them from the face of the spoiler." The prophet Obadiah brings
the following charge against treacherous Edom, which is precisely
applicable to this guilty nation:--"For thy violence against thy
brother Jacob, shame shall come over thee, and thou shalt be cut off
for ever. In the day that thou stoodest on the other side, in the
day that the strangers carried away captive his forces, and
foreigners entered into his gates, and cast lots upon Jerusalem,
_even thou was