extension.  To acquiesce in the honesty and justice of such a course of policy as the last few years have shown, to assist in inaugurating a future that shall accord with it, is nationality and conservatism!  No wonder Mr. Cushing is charmed with the consistency of his new allies.  Do they propose to steal Cuba?—­they are the party who would extend the area of Freedom.  Do they make Slavery a matter of federal concern by means of the Supreme Court?—­they are the party who maintain that it is an affair of local law.  Do they disfranchise a race?—­they are the party of equal rights.  And the whole wretched imbroglio of creed which is the condemnation of their action, and of action, which is the death of their creed, is dubbed Nationality.  If sectionalism be the reverse of all this, we confess that we prefer sectionalism.  It is a nationality which has no Northern half, a conservatism which abolishes all our heroic traditions.

If the Democratic Party has been urged to such extreme measures and such motley self-stultification by the pressure of the South, if every downward step has been only the more likely to be taken because it seemed impossible six months before, what are we not to look for, now that its leaders are emboldened by success, and its lieutenants are eager for more plunder at the easy price of more perfidy?  Already, as we have seen, the reopening of the slave-trade is demanded; already fresh enactments are called for, expressly to render it in future impossible for the people of a Territory to loosen the grip of Slavery, as those of Kansas have done.  And to prepare the way for this, we are forced to hear continual homilies on the supremacy of law, on what are called “legal conscience” and “legal morality,”—­phrases which sound well, but cover nothing more than the absurd fallacy, that everything is legal which can by any hocus-pocus be got enacted.  The doctrine, that there is no higher law than the written statute, is but one of the symptoms of the steady drift of our leading politicians toward materialism, toward a faith which makes the products of man’s industry of more value than man himself, and finds the god of this lower world in the law of demand and supply.  “Cotton is King!” say such reasoners as Mr. Cushing;—­“Conscience is King!” said such actors as the Puritans.  To have a moral sense may be very unwise, very visionary, very unphilosophic; but most men are foolish enough to have one, and the enforcing of any law which wounds it is sure to arouse a resistance thoroughly pervading their whole being and lasting as life itself.  The carrying away of a single fugitive[3] gave the Republicans a tenure of power in Massachusetts, as firm, and likely to be as enduring, as that of the Whigs was once.  The propagandists of Slavery overreached themselves when they compelled the people of the North to be their accomplices.  The higher law is not a thing men argue about, but act upon.  People who admit the right of property a thousand miles off go back to first principles when the property comes to their door in the upright form of man and appeals for sympathy with a human voice.