inhabitants, and the price of labor shall have reached a minimum, (a comparative minimum I suppose is meant,) free labor will be found cheaper than slave labor.  Slaves will then be without employment, and, of course, without the means of comfortable subsistence, which will reduce their numbers, and finally extirpate them.  This is the argument as I understand it,” says Mr. Sergeant; and, certainly, one more chimerical or more inhuman could not have been urged.]

[Footnote B:  See Appendix, E.]

Immediately after this achievement, the slaveholding interest was still more strongly fortified by the acquisition of Florida, and the establishment of slavery there, as it had already been in the territory of Louisiana.  The Missouri triumph, however, seems to have extinguished every thing like a systematic or spirited opposition, on the part of the free states, to the pretensions of the slaveholding South.

Arkansas was admitted but the other day, with nothing that deserves to be called an effort to prevent it—­although her Constitution attempts to perpetuate slavery, by forbidding the master to emancipate his bondmen without the consent of the Legislature, and the Legislature without the consent of the master.  Emboldened, but not satisfied, with their success in every political contest with the people of the free states, the slaveholders are beginning now to throw off their disguise—­to brand their former notions about the “evil, political and moral” of slavery, as “folly and delusion,"[A]—­and as if to “make assurance double sure,” and defend themselves forever, by territorial power, against the progress of Free principles and the renovation of the Constitution, they now demand openly—­scorning to conceal that their object is, to advance and establish their political power in the country,—­that Texas, a foreign state, five or six times as large as all New England, with a Constitution dyed as deep in slavery, as that of Arkansas, shall be added to the Union.

[Footnote A:  Mr. Calhoun is reported, in the National Intelligencer, as having used these words in a speech delivered in the Senate, the 10th day of January:—­

“Many in the South once believed that it [slavery] was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone.  We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.”

Mr. Hammond, formerly a Representative in Congress from South Carolina, delivered a speech (Feb. 1, 1836) on the question of receiving petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.  In answering those who objected to a slaveholding country, that it was “assimilated to an aristocracy,” he says—­“In this they are right.  I accept the terms. It is a government of the best. Combining all the advantages, and possessing but few of the disadvantages, of the aristocracy of the old world—­without fostering, to an unwarrantable