consent of
the governed, was driven into refusing to submit a constitution to
the people whose destiny was to be decided by it. And all this has
been done, not for the security of Slavery where it exists, but to
serve the truculent purposes of its indefinite extension. To
acquiesce in the honesty and justice of such a course of policy as
the last few years have shown, to assist in inaugurating a future
that shall accord with it, is nationality and conservatism! No
wonder Mr. Cushing is charmed with the consistency of his new allies.
Do they propose to steal Cuba?--they are the party who would extend
the area of Freedom. Do they make Slavery a matter of federal concern
by means of the Supreme Court?--they are the party who maintain that
it is an affair of local law. Do they disfranchise a race?--they are
the party of equal rights. And the whole wretched imbroglio of creed
which is the condemnation of their action, and of action, which is
the death of their creed, is dubbed Nationality. If sectionalism be
the reverse of all this, we confess that we prefer sectionalism. It
is a nationality which has no Northern half, a conservatism which
abolishes all our heroic traditions.

If the Democratic Party has been urged to such extreme measures and
such motley self-stultification by the pressure of the South, if
every downward step has been only the more likely to be taken
because it seemed impossible six months before, what are we not to
look for, now that its leaders are emboldened by success, and its
lieutenants are eager for more plunder at the easy price of more
perfidy? Already, as we have seen, the reopening of the slave-trade
is demanded; already fresh enactments are called for, expressly to
render it in future impossible for the people of a Territory to
loosen the grip of Slavery, as those of Kansas have done. And to
prepare the way for this, we are forced to hear continual homilies
on the supremacy of law, on what are called "legal conscience" and
"legal morality,"--phrases which sound well, but cover nothing more
than the absurd fallacy, that everything is legal which can by any
hocus-pocus be got enacted. The doctrine, that there is no higher
law than the written statute, is but one of the symptoms of the
steady drift of our leading politicians toward materialism, toward
a faith which makes the products of man's industry of more value
than man himself, and finds the god of this lower world in the
law of demand and