their innocent unconsciousness, supply his political needs?  It is not easy to answer these questions.  We begin now upon the views of a Pennsylvania Oppositionist; and quicksilver defied not more utterly the skill of Raymond Lullius than the doctrines of the Philadelphia school perplex the inquiries of sharply defined New England minds.  The rudimentary state of Republican principles may nowhere else be so clearly seen as in Pennsylvania.  Four years of the Democratic administration of her “favorite son” have done much to make her less favored sons into good Republicans; but the State needs another Democratic President.  Mr. Fisher appears to much more advantage in pulling down than in building up.  We have hitherto seen only the keen, fearless dissector of fraud and hypocrisy; we are now to contemplate a circumspect alarmist, who dreads to call things by their right names for fear of unpleasant consequences.  He is such a master of English, so judicious in the use of middle terms,—­so shrewd a fencer altogether,—­that even his timidity cannot make him other than a formidable opponent.

Mr. Fisher, believing that slavery receives ample protection from a fair interpretation of the Constitution, holds that

“Congress has plenary power over the Territories, often exercised on this subject of slavery.  It may be said that Congress has on various occasions prohibited slavery in the Territories.  True; but with the consent and cooeperation of the Southern States.  The people of all the States have equal right in the Territories.  To exclude the people of the Slave States, therefore, without their consent, would be unequal and opposed to the spirit of the Constitution.”

Certainly it would.  Who proposes to do it?  No living man, woman, or child.  It is worth noticing, by the way, that the Republican party is not committed to the doctrine of carrying out the principle of the Wilmot Proviso.  But supposing it were, Mr. Fisher’s argument has no force or direction, unless he can establish his suppressed premise,—­that the exclusion of slavery from the Territories is the exclusion of “the people of the Slave States” from the Territories.  And to make that good, all Mr. Fisher’s skill and ingenuity will be required.  Why so many Northern politicians should have weakly surrendered this point is a mystery.  Because the slaveholders (who are not, Mr. Fisher, “the people of the Slave States,” by any means, but a small portion of them) are at home a privileged aristocracy, have they any claim to the same position abroad?  If so, on what does it rest?  The laws of the Southern States?  They are now beyond their jurisdiction.  The common law?  To that wise and beneficent law slavery is a thing unknown.  The Constitution?  It is silent.  There is no exclusion of the Southerners even proposed.  Let them come:  but when they claim to carry with them the right to hold a certain class of men as property because they are recognized as property by certain local regulations elsewhere prevailing, they must not complain, if such a claim be disallowed.  The Southerner’s complaint, that he is accustomed to the institution of slavery, is fairly met by the Northerner’s retort, that he is accustomed to the institution of freedom.