We will content ourselves with going back to the last Mexican war and to the Wilmot proviso.  This was, as is known, a measure, or proviso, stipulating that slavery could not be introduced into conquered provinces.  Such was the starting point.  It was sought then, in 1847, to prevent the territorial extension of slavery.  This seems to me reasonable enough; and I am not astonished that the Lincoln platform tends simply to return to this primitive policy.  The measure passes the House of Representatives, but is defeated in the Senate.  Notwithstanding, the American people hold firm to the principle that slavery shall henceforth no longer be extended; it elects, in 1848, the upright Administration of Gen. Taylor.  The cause of justice seems about to triumph, when the death of the whig President, succeeded by the feeble Mr. Fillmore, comes to restore good fortune to the Southerners, the proviso is forgotten, and the nation, weary of resistance, ends by adopting a series of deplorable compromises.

Beginning from this moment, the progress of the evil is rapid.  Among the compromises, the oldest and most respected, dating back to 1820, was that which bore the name of the Missouri Compromise.  On admitting Missouri as a Slave State, it had been stipulated that slavery should be no longer introduced north of the 36th degree of latitude.  Of this limit, so long accepted, the South now complains; it is no longer willing that the development of its “peculiar institution” shall be obstructed in any thing.  Other combats, another victory.  A bill proposed by Mr. Douglas annuls the Missouri Compromise, and, based on the principle of local sovereignties, withdraws from Congress the right to interfere in the question of slavery.

The Wilmot proviso could not subsist in the presence of these absolute pretensions.  The liberty of slavery (pardon me this mournful and involuntary conjunction) finds an application on the spot.  At this juncture, Texas, a province detached from Mexico, is admitted in the quality of a slave State.

What happens then?  The partisans of slavery, hampered by nothing any longer, either by limits at the North, or limits at the South, or provisos, or compromises, encounter, to their great horror, an obstacle of quite a different nature.  The local sovereignty which they have invoked turns against them; in the Territory of Kansas, the majority votes the exclusion of slavery.  At once the Southerners change theory; against local sovereignty they invoke the central power; they demand, they exact that the decisions of the majority in Kansas shall be trodden under foot; they put forward the natural right of slavery.  Why shall they be prevented from settling in a Territory with the slaves, their property?  When this Territory shall be by and by transformed into a State, there will doubtless be a right to determine the question; but to abolish slavery is quite a different thing from excluding it.