a readier welcome and surer sanctuary.  We shall continue to think the negro a man, and on Southern evidence, too, as long as he is counted in the population represented on the floor of Congress,—­for three-fifths of perfect manhood would be a high average even among white men; as long as he is hanged or worse, as an example and terror to others,—­for we do not punish one animal for the moral improvement of the rest; as long as he is considered capable of religious instruction,—­for we fancy the gorillas would make short work with a missionary; as long as there are fears of insurrection,—­for we never heard of a combined effort at revolt in a menagerie.  Accordingly, we do not see how the particular right of whose infringement we hear so much is to be made safer by the election of Mr. Bell, Mr. Breckinridge, or Mr. Douglas,—­there being quite as little chance that any of them would abolish human nature as that Mr. Lincoln would abolish slavery.  The same generous instinct that leads some among us to sympathize with the sorrows of the bereaved master will always, we fear, influence others to take part with the rescued man.

But if our Constitutional Obligations, as we like to call our constitutional timidity or indifference, teach us that a particular divinity hedges the Domestic Institution, they do not require us to forget that we have institutions of our own, worth maintaining and extending, and not without a certain sacredness, whether we regard the traditions of the fathers or the faith of the children.  It is high time that we should hear something of the rights of the Free States, and of the duties consequent upon them.  We also have our prejudices to be respected, our theory of civilization, of what constitutes the safety of a state and insures its prosperity, to be applied wherever there is soil enough for a human being to stand on and thank God for making him a man.  Is conservatism applicable only to property, and not to justice, freedom, and public honor?  Does it mean merely drifting with the current of evil times and pernicious counsels, and carefully nursing the ills we have, that they may, as their nature it is, grow worse?

To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with the fever and ague on him to stop shaking and he will be cured.  The discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what?  The manufacturers of the Free States constitute a more numerous class than the slaveholders of the South:  suppose they should claim an equal sanctity for the Protective System.  Discussion is the very life of free institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed.  The Swiss guide enjoins silence in the region of avalanches, lest the mere vibration of the voice should dislodge the ruin clinging by frail roots of snow.  But where is our avalanche to fall?  It is to overwhelm