There is always a fallacy in the argument of the opponents of the Republican party.  They affirm that all the States and all the citizens of the States ought to have equal rights in the Territories.  Undoubtedly.  But the difficulty is that they cannot.  The slaveholder moves into a new Territory with his institution, and from that moment the free white settler is virtually excluded. His institutions he cannot take with him; they refuse to root themselves in soil that is cultivated by slave-labor.  Speech is no longer free; the post-office is Austrianized; the mere fact of Northern birth may be enough to hang him.  Even now in Texas, settlers from the Free States are being driven out and murdered for pretended complicity in a plot the evidence for the existence of which has been obtained by means without a parallel since the trial of the Salem witches, and the stories about which are as absurd and contradictory as the confessions of Goodwife Corey.  Kansas was saved, it is true; but it was the experience of Kansas that disgusted the South with Mr. Douglas’s panacea of “Squatter Sovereignty.”

The claim of equal rights in the Territories is a specious fallacy.  Concede the demand of the slavery-extensionists, and you give up every inch of territory to slavery, to the absolute exclusion of freedom.  For what they ask (however they may disguise it) is simply this,—­that their local law be made the law of the land, and coextensive with the limits of the General Government.  The Constitution acknowledges no unqualified or interminable right of property in the labor of another; and the plausible assertion, that “that is property which the law makes property,” (confounding a law existing anywhere with the law which is binding everywhere,) can deceive only those who have either never read the Constitution or are ignorant of the opinions and intentions of those who framed it.  It is true only of the States where slavery already exists; and it is because the propagandists of slavery are well aware of this, that they are so anxious to establish by positive enactment the seemingly moderate title to a right of existence for their institution in the Territories,—­a title which they do not possess, and the possession of which would give them the oyster and the Free States the shells.  Laws accordingly are asked for to protect Southern property in the Territories,—­that is, to protect the inhabitants from deciding for themselves what their frame of government shall be.  Such laws will be passed, and the fairest portion of our national domain irrevocably closed to free labor, if the Non-Slave-holding States fail to do their duty in the present crisis.