16 j direction of those peaceful arrhies away from Nebraska. So long as you shall leave them room on hill or prairie, by river side' or in the mountain fastnesses, they will dispose of themselves peacefully and lawfully in the places you shall have left open to them ; and there they will erect new States upon free soil, to be forever maintained and defended by free arms, and aggrandized by free labor. American slavery, I know, has a large and ever-flowing spring, but it cannot pour forth its blackened tide in volumes like that I have described. If you are wise, these tides of freemen and of slaves will never meet, for they will not voluntarily commingle; but if, nevertheless, through your own erroneous policy, their repulsive currents must be directed against each other, so that they needs must meet, then it is easy to see, in that case, which of them will overcome the resistance of the other, and which of them, thus overpowered, will roll back to drown, the source which sent it forth. “Man proposes, and God disposes.” You may legislate and abrogate and abnegate as you will; but there is a Superior Power that overrules all your actions, and all your refusals to act; and, I fondly hope and tru^t, overrules them to the advancement of the happiness, greatness, and glory of our country—that overrules, I know, not only all your actions, and all your refusals to act, but all human events, to the distant, but inevitable result of the equal and universal liberty of all men. where you may expect to tneet it next. I much mistake if, in that case, you do not meet it there where we, who once were slaveholding States, as you now are, have met, and, happily for us, succumbed before i,t—namely, in the legislative halls, in the churches and schools, and at the fireside, within the States themselves. It is an angel of mercy with which sooner or later every slaveholding State must wrestle, and by which it must be overcome. Even if, by reason of this measure, it should the sootier come to that point, and although I am sure that you will not .overcome freedom, but that freedom will overcome you, yet I do not look even then for dis-, astrous or unhappy results. The institutions of our country are so framed, that the inevitable conflict of opinion on slavery, as on every other subject, cannot be otherwise than peaceful in its course and beneficent in its termination. Nor shall I “ bate one jot of heart or hope,” in maintaining a just equilibrium of the nonslaveholding States, even if this ill-starred measure shall be adopted. The non-slave- holding States are teeming with an increase of freemen—educated, vigorous, enlightened, enterprising freemen—such freemen as neither England, nor Rome, nor even Athens, ever reared. Half a million of freemen from Europe annually augment that increase; < and, ten years hence half a million, twenty years hence a million, of freemen from Asia will augment it still more. You may obstruct, and so turn the I
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