6 and suppress insurrections of the native Indian tribes. It is only an occasional and incidental function of that army, to suppress insurrections of citizens seldom expected to occur. This Capitol is surrounded by a national metropolis, and its streets, lanes, and alleys, are doubtless filled with misery and guilt, adequate to the generation of all sorts of crimes. Yet the laws.prescribed for municipal government within the District of Columbia are executed without the aid of the army of the United States. Neither House of Congress, nor the Common Council of Washington, nor the Common Council of Georgetown, nor the President of the United States, nor the Marshal of the District of Columbia, nor yet the Mayors of either of those cities, nor any court within the District, is attended by any armed force or detachment, or protected even by an armed sentinel. Why is this so ? It is because the people acquiesce, and the laws execute themselves. This case of the District of Columbia is the strongest which can be presented against the principle for which I contend, for the people of the District are actually disfranchised, out of regard to the security of the Federal Government. Look into the States—into Maryland on one side of the Federal Capital, and into Virginia on the other; into Delaware as you ascend northward, into North Carolina as you descend southward, into Pennsylvania and into South Carolina, into ! New Jersey and into Georgia, even into Maine and I into Texas; go eastward—go westward, throughout all the States, throughout even the Territories, Minnesota, Utah, Washington, Oregon, and New Mexico—everywhere throughout the Republic, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific ocean—everywhere, except in Kansas, the people are dwelling in peaceful submission to the laws which they themselves have established, free from any intrusion of the army of the United States. The time was, and that not long ago, when a proposition to employ the standing army of the United States as a domestic police would have been universally denounced as a premature revelation of a plot, darkly contrived in the chambers of conspiracy, to subvert the liberties of the people, and to overthrow the Republic itself. The Republic stands upon a fundamental principle, that the people, in the exercise of equal rights, will establish only just and equal laws, and that their own free and enlightened public opinion is the only legitimate reliance for the maintenance and execution of such laws. This principle is not even peculiar to ourselves—it lies at the foundation of the government of every free people on earth. It is public opinion, not the Imperial army, that executes the laws of the realm in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Whenever France is free, it is public opinion that executes the laws of her republican legislature. It is public opinion that executes the laws in all the Cantons of Switzerland. The British constitution is quite as jealous of standing armies as a police, as our own. Government there, indeed, maintains standing armies, as it does a great naval force, but it employs the one, as it does the other, exclusively for defence or for conquest against foreign States. Fearful lest the armed power of the State might be turned against the people to enforce obnoxious edicts or statutes, the British constitution forbids that any regular army whatever shall be tolerated, on any pretence. The considerable military force which is maintained in different and distant parts of the Empire, only exists by a suspension of that part of the constitution, which suspension is renewed by Parliament from year to year, and never for more than one year at a time. Civil liberty, and a standing army for the purposes of civil police, have never yet stood together, and never can stand together. If I* am to choose, sir, between upholding laws, in any part of this Republic, which cannot be maintained without a standing army, or relinquishing the laws themselves, I give up the laws at once, by whomsoever they are made, and by whatever authority; for either our system of government is radically wrong, or such laws are unjust, unequal, and pernicious. Such is the presumption against the pretended laws of Kansas, which arises out of the proposition in debate. I shall not, however, in so grave a case, leave my argument to rest upon mere presumption. Listen to me while I recite some of the principal statutes of the Territorial Legislature of Kansas, which the Senate, differing from the House of Representatives, proposes to enforce at the point of the bayonet against citizens of the United States: “ No person who is conscientiously opposed to the holding of slaves, or who does not admit the right to hold slaves in this Territory, shall be a juror in any cause in which the right to hold any person in slavery is involved, nor in any cause in which any injury done to. or committed by, any slave, is in issue, nor in any criminal proceeding for the violation of any law enacted for the protection of slave property, and for the punishment of crime committed against the right to such property.” Here is an edict which subverts that old Saxon
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