4 factures and trade, which were innocent and beneficent, I shall never be a denizen of a State where men and women are reared as cattle, and bought and sold as merchandise. "When that evil day shall come, and all further effort at resistance shall be impossible, then, if there shall be no better hope for redemption than I can now foresee, I shall say with Franklin, while looking abroad over the whole earth for a new and more congenial home, “ Where liberty dwells, there is my country.” You will tell me that these fears are extravagant and chimerical. I answer, they are so; but they are so only because the designs of the slaveholders must and can be defeated. But it is only the possibility of defeat that renders them so. They cannot be defeated by inactivity. There is no escape from them, compatible with non-resistance. How, then, and in what way, shall the necessary resistance be made ? There is only one way. The Democratic party must be permanently dislodged from the Government. The reason is, that the Democratic party is inextricably committed to the designs of the slaveholders, which I have described. Let me be well understood. I do not charge that the Democratic candidates for public office now before the people are pledged to, much less that the Democratic masses who support them really adopt, those atrocious and dangerous designs. Candidates may, and generally ,do, mean to act justly, wisely, and patriotically, when they shall be elected; but they become the ministers and servants, not the dictators, of the power which elects them. The policy which a party shall pursue at a future period is only gradually developed, depending on the occurrence of events never fully foreknown. The motives of men, whether acting as electors or in any other capacity, are generally pure. Nevertheless, it is not more true that “Hell is paved with good intentions,” than it is that earth is covered with wrecks resulting from innocent and amiable motives. The very constitution of the Democratic party commits it to execute all the designs of the slaveholders, whatever they may be. It is not a party of the whole Union, of all the free States and of all the slave States; nor yet is it. a party of the free States in the North and in the Northwest; but it is a sectional and local party, having practically its seat within the slave States, and counting its constituency chiefly and almost exclusively there. Of all its representatives in Congress and in the Electoral Colleges, two-thirds uniformly come from these States.. Its great element of strength lies in the vote of the slaveholders, augmented by the representation of three- fifths of the slaves. Deprive the Democratic party of this strength, and it would be a helpless and hopeless minority, incapable of con-. tinued organization. The Democratic party,, being thus local and sectional, acquires new strength from the admission of every new slave State, and loses relatively by the admission of every new free State into the Union. ' A party is in one sense a joint-stock association, in which those who contribute most direct the action and management of the concern. The slaveholders, contributing in an overwhelming proportion to the capital strength of the Democratic party, they necessarily dictate and prescribe its policy. The * inevitable caucus system enables them to do so with a show of fairness and justice. If it were possible to conceive for a moment that the Democratic party should disobey the behests of the slaveholders, we should then see a withdrawal of the slaveholders, which would, leave the party to perish. The portion of the party which is found in the free States is a mere appendage, convenient to modify its sectional character, without impairing its sectional constitution, and is less effective in regulating its movement than the nebulous- tail of the comet is in determining the appointed though apparently eccentric course of the fiery sphere from which it emanates. To expect the Democratic party to resist Slavery and favor Freedom, is as unreasonable as to look for Protestant missionaries to the Catholic Propaganda of Rome. The history of the Democratic party commits it to the policy of Slavery. It has been the Democratic party, and no other agency, which has carried that policy up to its present alarming culmination. Without stopping to ascertain, critically, the origin of the present Democratic party, we may concede its claim to date from the era of good feeling which occurred under the Administration of President Monroe. At that time, in this State, and about that time in many others of the free States, the Democratic party deliberately disfranchised the free colored or African citizen, and it has pertinaciously continued this disfranchisement ever since. This was an effective aid to Slavery; for while the slaveholder votes for his slaves against Freedom, the freed slave in the free States is prohibited from voting against Slavery. In 1824, the Democracy resisted the election of John Quincy Adams—himself before that time an acceptable Democrat—and in 1828, it expelled him from the Presidency and put a slaveholder in his place, although the office had been filled by slaveholders thirty-two out of forty years. In 1836,.Martin_Van Biiren—the first_non-_ slaveholding citizen of a free State to whose election the Democratic party evei’ consented —signalized his inauguration into the Presidency by a gratuitous announcement, that
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