in the persons of Judas Iscariot and the chief priests. In the days of our own Revolution, when Washington and his noble associates were carrying on that struggle to establish justice, and to secure the blessings of liberty to them selves and their posterity, they met with the same class of men in the admirers of George III and Lord North. They are all of the same class—false to the education of their fathers—false to the great principles which have been instilled into them by their mothers from their birth—willing to do anything that will minister to the cupidity of their masters, let the consequences be what they may. It is this class of men, aided by a close aristocracy at the S>uth, that has enabled the minority to rule with iron hand the majority, since the organization of this Government. I have endeavored to daguerreotype these men for the benefit of future ages; for I believe that, like the Indian tribes, they are disappear ing. You have put them to very hard service, sir. They die faster than the Northern negroes in your rice-swamps—politically, I mean. You put them to service that they cannot stand. Whea you ask them to vote for a fugitive bill, they may do it once, but political death stares them in the face. When you ask them to go with you for the repeal of the Missouri restriction, you find the same state of things And now, worst of all, when you ask them to fasten upon their fellow men, in a Territory of the United States, a Constitution which that, people abhor, I tell you every Northern repre sentative who participates in this act is not only politically dead, but he may thank his God if he escapes with that. A LAWYER ADMITS AWAY HIS OWN CASE. I find, sir, that I am detaining the Senate longer than I wished ; and yet, if I am to go over the argument of the subject immediately under consideration, I shall have to detain them some time longer. [“ Go on ! ”] I shall be as brief as possible on this part of the case. I desire first to notice some things in the argument of the able and eloquent gentleman from Louisiana, [Mr. Benjamin.] who addressed us on the day before yesterday. He endeavored to show that there was a distinction between the right of a slaveholder to his slave and the remedy he might have ; and hence he claimed that, when a slave went into a free country, the master did not lose his right over him, but lost the remedy. He said that in a free country, where there was no law for the protection of the rights of the master, he did not lose his right to the slave, but lost his remedy—lost his power to control the slave. He likened it to the case of a man who had a patent right, or a poet who had a property in the productions of his own inspiration. I will read the Senator’s language, to show how the most gifted man, when he is not on his guard, may admit away his own case. He said: “ There lives now a man in England, who, from time to time «ings, to the enchanted ear of th civilized world, ’trains of such melody that the charmed senses seem to abandon the gros ser regions of earth, and to rise to purer and serener regions above. God has created that man a poet. His inspiration is his; his songs are his by right Divine; they are his property, so reccgnised by human law; yet here, in these United States, men steal Tennyson’s works, and sell his property for their profit; and this because, in spite of the violated conscience of the nation we refuse to give him protection for his property.” Again, following out the same idea, he said : “ Does not every man see at once that the right of the inventor to his discovery, that the right of the poet to his inspiration, depends upon those, principles of eternal justice which God has implanted in the heart of man ; and that wherever he cannot exercise them, it is because man, faithless to the trust that he has received from God, denies them the protection to which they are entitled.” That is a very sound doctrine, in my judgment ; it is an appeal to that higher law which has been so much traduced. The poet has a divine right to the inspiration of his genius and the products of his mind; the inventor of a machine has a God-given right to the use of his discovery. Does not the honorable Senator see, that if these rights are from God, above human law, no Constitution and no law can take them away ? And how much more has a man a right to his own body and to his own soul, than he can be said to have to his own productions? How could the gentleman fail to see that, if the poet and the inventor had this divine right, the slaveholder could not claim the right of ownership over another man ? Would not that man have the game Gcd-given right that he claims for the poet and the discoverer? Most assuredly he would. This admission stultified his whole case. He admits, then, that Slavery would be impossible. It is not a matter of right. No, sir; he might as well admit at the outset that Slavery is not a matter of right. It is a matter of positive law. It is a matter of force. It is a matter of fraud. It is not a matter of right; and the moment the slave gets beyond the power to enforce the mandate, he is as free as his master. Has God Almighty put any mark on him, by which you can say, when he gets into a foreign jurisdiction, which is the slave and which the master? The slave might as well claim a right to the master, as the master to the slave, the moment he passes beyond the jurisdiction. THE GREAT FRAUD. Now, Mr. President, with regard to the Kansas question, I shall treat it very briefly. I contended here, four years ago, that the abrogation of the Missouri restriction would be attended by the same train of circumstances that has taken place. I ^contended then that you were opening this Territory to strife and to contention; that you were putting it up to a vendue, to make it a theatre where the most selfish and outrageous passions would contend for the mastery; that you were begetting a state of civil war. You claimed that it was going to be all peace ; that it was done for the purpose of withdrawing this terrible controversy from
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