15 this glorious Federal Constitution of ours is adapted to the inevitable expansion of the empire which I have so feebly presented. It has been perverted often by misconstruction, and it has yet to be perverted many times, and widely, hereafter; but it has inherent,strength and vigor, that will cast off all the webs which the everchanging interests of classes may weave around it. If it fail us now, it will, however, not be our fault, but because an inevitable crisis, like that of youth, or of manhood, is to be encountered by a constitution proved in that case to be inadequate to the trial. I am sure that no patriot, who views the subject as I do, could wish to evade or delay the trial. By delay we could only extend Slavery, at the most, throughout the Atlantic region of the continent. The. Pacific slope is free, and it always must and will be free. The mountain barriers that separate us from that portion of our empire are quite enough to alienate us too widely, possibly to separate us too soon. Let us only become all slaveholding States on this side of those barriers, while only free States are organized and perpetuated on the other side, and then indeed there will coms a division of the great American family into two nations, equally ambitious for complete’ control over the continent, and a conflict between them, over which the world will mourn, as the greatest and last to be retrieved of all the calamities that have ever befallen the human race.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=