9 You accuse the Republican party of ulterior and secret designs. How can a party that counts its votes in this land of free speech and free press by the hundreds of thousands, have any secret designs ? Who is the conjurer, and where are the hidden springs by which he can control its uncongregated and widely-dispersed masses, and direct them to objects unseen and purposes unavowed ? But what are these hidden purposes ? You name only one. That one is to introduce negro equality among you. Suppose we had the power to change your social system: what warrant have you for supposing that we should carry negro equality among you? We know, and we will show you, if you will only give heed, that what our system of labor works out, wherever it works out anything, is the equality of white men. The laborer in the free States, no matter how humble his occupation, is a white man, and he is politically the equal of his employer. Eighteen of our thirty-three States are free- labor States. There they are: Maine, Hew Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, California, and Oregon. I do not array them in contrast with the capital States. I am no assailant of States. All of the States are parcels of my own country—the best of them not so wise and g»-eat as I am sure it will hereafter be; the State least developed and perfected among them all >5 wiser and better than any foreign state I know. Is it then in any, and in which, of the States I have named that negro equality offends the white man’s pride ? Throughout the wide world, where is the State where class and caste are so utterly extinguished as they are in each-and every one of them ? Let the European immigrant, who avoids the African as if his skin exhaled contagion, answer. You find him always in the State where labor is ever free. Did Washington, Jefferson, and Henry, when they implored you to relinquish your system and accept the one we have adopted, propose to sink you down to the level of the African, or was it their desire to exalt all white men to a common political elevation? But we do not seek to force, or even to intrude, our system, on you. We are excluded justly, wisely, and contentedly, from all political p«wer and responsibility in your capital States. You arc sovereign on the subject of slavery within your own borders, as we are on the same subject within our borders. It is well and wisely so arranged. Use your authority to maintain what system you please. We are not distrustful of the result. We have wisely, as we think, exercised ours to protect and perfect the manhood of the members of the State. The whole sovereignty upon domestic concerns within the Union is divided between us by unmistakable boundaries. You have your fifteen distinct parts ; we eighteen parts, equally distinct. Each must be maintained in order that the whole may be preserved. If ours shall be assailed, within or without, by any enemy, or for any cause, and we shall have need, we shall expect you to defend it. If yours shall be so assailed, in the emergency, no matter what the cause or the pretext, or who the foe, we shall defend your sovereignty as the equivalent of our own. We cannot, indeed, accept your system of capital or its ethics. That would be to surrender and subvert our own, which we esteem to be better. Besides, if we could, what need for any division into States at all? You are equally at liberty to reject our system and its ethics, and to maintain the superiority of your own by all the forces of persuasion and argument. We must, indeed, mutually discuss both systems. All the' world discusses all systems. Especially must we discuss them since we have to decide as a nation which of the two we ought to ingraft on the new and future States growing up in the great public domain. Discussion then being unavoidable, what could be more wise than to conduct it with mutual toleration and in a fraternal spirit ? You complain that Republicans discourse too boldly and directly, when they express with confidence their belief that the system of labor will, in the end, be universally accepted by the capital States, acting for themselves, and in conformity with their own constitutions, while they sanction too unreservedly books designed to advocate emancipation. But surely you can hardly expect the Federal Government or the political parties of the nation to maintain a censorship of the press or of debate. The theory of our system is, that error of -opinion may in all cases safely be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. Will it be claimed that more of modera-
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=