supply. "Cotton is King!" say such reasoners as
Mr. Cushing;--"Conscience is King!" said such actors as the Puritans.
To have a moral sense may be very unwise, very visionary, very
unphilosophic; but most men are foolish enough to have one, and the
enforcing of any law which wounds it is sure to arouse a resistance
thoroughly pervading their whole being and lasting as life itself.
The carrying away of a single fugitive[3] gave the Republicans a
tenure of power in Massachusetts, as firm, and likely to be as
enduring, as that of the Whigs was once. The propagandists of
Slavery overreached themselves when they compelled the people of the
North to be their accomplices. The higher law is not a thing men
argue about, but act upon. People who admit the right of property a
thousand miles off go back to first principles when the property
comes to their door in the upright form of man and appeals for
sympathy with a human voice.

Mr. Cushing represents Massachusetts to be a Babel of _isms_, so
many square miles of Bedlam, from Boston Corner to Provincetown. Is
this intended as a depreciation of our free institutions, by showing
the results to which they inevitably lead? Has a Rarey for vicious
hobbies been a _desideratum_ so long, and has such a benefactor of
his species found his avatar at last in Mr. Cushing? He tells us,
however, that the delusion of _Negrophilism_, that is, Republicanism,
is on the wane, and is destined to speedy extinction. The very
extravagancies he speaks of as so rife and so rampant are to us
evidence of the contrary. They prove the depth to which the
religious instincts of the Northern people have been stirred upon
the question of Slavery. Such extravagancies have accompanied every
great moral movement of mankind. The Reformation, the great Puritan
Rebellion, the French Revolution, brought them forth in swarms. A
profound historical thinker, Gervinus, remarks, that the political
enthusiasm of a nation is slow to warm and swift to cool, but that
its moral enthusiasm is quickly stirred and long in subsiding.
Thinking men will ask themselves whether the _isms_ Mr. Cushing
enumerates be not the external symptoms of such an enthusiasm,--and
whether it be wise, under the names of "Nationality" and "Conservatism,"
to urge aggressions to the point where it becomes the right and the
duty of men to consider the terrible necessity of a change in their
system of government; whether it be unpatriotic to resist the