“This labor-question of the South does not depend upon such miserable clap-trap as Kansas or the Fugitive Slave Law.  It rests upon a full, open, and deliberate recognition of the rights of the Southern people; and the Senator from Illinois, by moving the abrogation of the so-called slave-trade treaty with England, allowing the South to supply herself with labor as she may see fit, would give, indeed, unquestioned assurance of his disposition and courage to follow the principle of the white-basis to its logical and constitutional consequence.”

It declares that the sending home of the Africans would be “a practical reversal of the Dred Scott decision,” and adds,—­“We have no fear that our people will long remain passive under such an accumulating weight of inequality.” [2]

Is not this explicit enough? and does not the “white-basis” sufficiently explain what is meant by the systematic depreciation of the colored race in Mr. Cushing’s letter?

The Democratic Party is the party of “Progress.”  What is the direction of that progress likely to be?  What is the lesson of the past?  Hitherto this party has been the ally and the tool, not of the moderate, but of the extreme propagandas of the South.  The Carolinians with their Scotch blood received also a strong infusion of Scotch logic.  They felt that their system was inconsistent with the immortal assertion of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and with the principles of the Revolution,—­that its extension was a direct reversal of the creed and the policy of the men by whom our frame of government was established.  They accepted the alternative, and assumed the aggressive.  The principles of the Revolution must be crushed out, the traditions of the Fathers of the Republic repudiated,—­and that, too, by means of the party calling itself Democratic, through which alone the South could control the policy of the government.

Accordingly, a reaction was put in motion and steadily pressed, precisely similar in kind to that organized by Louis Napoleon against the principles of the French Revolution, and supported by precisely the same warnings of the danger of civil commotion, and by appeals to the timidity of Property and the cupidity of Trade.  The party which had so long vaunted the derivation of its fundamental truth from the Law of Nature was compelled to make it a part of its creed that there was nothing higher than an ordinance of man.  The party of State-Rights was forced to proclaim that a decision of the Supreme Court was sovereign over all the rights of the States.  The party whose leading dogma it is, that all power proceeds from and resides in the people, that all government rests on the consent of the governed, was driven into refusing to submit a constitution to the people whose destiny was to be decided by it.  And all this has been done, not for the security of Slavery where it exists, but to serve the truculent purposes of its indefinite