7 of our nature, and every precept of political experience teaches us, that “ Hl fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.” then where in Ireland, in Italy, in Poland, or in Hungary, has any ruler prepared for a generous and confiding people disappointments, disasters, and calamities equal to those which the Government of the United States holds now suspended over so large a portion of the continent of North America ? Citizens of the United States, in the spirit of this policy, subverted the free Republic of Nicaragua, and opened it to slavery and the African slave trade, and held it in that condition waiting annexation to the United States, until its sovereignty was restored by a combination of sister Republics exposed to the same danger, and apprehensive of similar subversion. Other citizens re-opened the foreign slave trade in violation of our laws and treaties; and, after a suspension of that shameful traffic for fifty years, savage Africans have been once more landed on our shores and distributed, unreclaimed and with impunity, among our plantations. For this policy, so far as the Government has sanctioned it, the Democratic party avows itself responsible. Everywhere complaint against it is denounced, and its opponents proscribed. When Kansas was writhing under the wounds of incipient, servile war, because of her resistance, the Democratic press deridingly said, “let her bleed.” Official integrity has been cause for rebuke and punishment,- when it resisted frauds designed to promote the extension of slavery. Throughout the whole Republic there is not one known dissenter from that policy remaining in place, if within the reach of the executive arm. Nor over the face of the whole world is there to be found one representative of our country who is not an apologist of the extension of slavery. It is in America that these things have happened. In the nineteenth century, the era of the world’s greatest progress, and while all nations but ourselves have been either abridging or altogether suppressing commerce in men; at the very moment when the Russian serf is emancipated, and the Georgian captive, the Neubian prisoner, and the Abyssinian savage are lifted up to freedom by the successor of Mohammed. The world, prepossessed in our behalf by our early devotion to the rights of human nature, as no nation ever before engaged its respect and sympathies, asks, in wonder and amazement, what all this demoralization means ? It has an excuse better than the world can imagine, better than we are generally conscious of ourselves, a vir tuous excuse. We have loved not freedom so much less, but the Union of our country so much more. We have been made to believe, from time to time, that, in a crisis, both of these precious institutions could not be saved together, and therefore we have, from time to time, surrendered safeguards of freedom to propitiate the loyalty of capital, and stay its hands from doing violence to the Union. The true state of the case, however, ought not to be a mystery to ourselves. Prescience, indeed, is not given to statesmen; but we are without excuse when we fail to apprehend the dogic of current events. Let parties, or the Government, choose or do what they may, the people of the United States do not prefer wealth to liberty, capital to labor, African slaves to white freemen, in the national territories and in future States. That question has never been distinctly recognized or acted on by them. The Republican party embodies the popular protest and reaction against a policy which has been fastened upon the nation by surprise, and which its reason and conscience, concurring with the reason and conscience of mankind, condemn. The choice of the nation is now between the Democratic party and the Republican party. Its principles and policy are, therefore, justly and even necessarily examined. I know of only one policy which it has adopted or avowed, namely: the saving of the Territories of the United States, if possible, by constitutional and lawful means, from being homes for slavery and polygamy. Who, that considers where this nation exists, of what races it is composed, in what age of the world it acts its part on the public stage, and what are its predominant institutions, customs, habits, and sentiments, doubts that the Republican party can and will, if unwaveringly faithful to that policy, and just and loyal in all beside, carry it into triumphal success ? To doubt is to be uncertain whether civilization can improve or Christianity save mankind. I may, perhaps, infer from the necessity of
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