You are in favor of increasing the number of slave states.  The terms of the celebrated “Missouri compromise” warrant, in your judgment, the increase.  But, notwithstanding you admit, that this unholy compromise, in which tranquillity was purchased at the expense of humanity and righteousness, does not “in terms embrace the case,” and “is not absolutely binding and obligatory;” you, nevertheless, make no attempt whatever to do away any one of the conclusive objections, which are urged against such increase.  You do not attempt to show how the multiplication of slave states can consist with the constitutional duty of the “United States to guarantee to every state in the Union a republican form of government,” any more than if it were perfectly clear, that a government is republican under which one half of the people are lawfully engaged in buying and selling the other half; or than if the doctrine that “all men are created equal” were not the fundamental and distinctive doctrine of a republican government.  You no more vindicate the proposition to enlarge the realm of slavery, than if the proposition were as obviously in harmony with, as it is opposed to the anti-slavery tenor and policy of the Constitution—­the rights of man—­and the laws of God.

You are perhaps of the number of those, who, believing, that a state can change its Constitution as it pleases, deem it futile in Congress to require, that States, on entering the Union, shall have anti-slavery Constitutions.  The Framers of the Federal Constitution doubtless foresaw the possibility of treachery, on the part of the new States, in the matter of slavery:  and the restriction in that instrument to the old States—­“the States now existing”—­of the right to participate in the internal and “African slave trade” may be ascribed to the motive of diminishing, if not indeed of entirely preventing, temptation to such treachery.  The Ordinance concerning the North-west Territory, passed by the Congress of 1787, and ratified by the Congress of 1790, shows, so far as those bodies can be regarded as correct interpreters of the Constitution which was framed in 1787, and adopted in 1789, that slavery was not to have a constitutional existence in the new States.  The Ordinance continues the privilege of recapturing fugitive slaves in the North-west Territory to the “existing States.”  Slaves in that territory, to be the subjects of lawful recapture, must in the language of the Ordinance, owe “labour or service in one of the original States.”

I close what I have to say on this topic, with the remark, that were it admitted, that the reasons for the increase of the number of slave States are sound and satisfactory, it nevertheless would not follow, that the moral and constitutional wrong of preventing that increase is so palpable, as to justify the scorn and insult, which are heaped by Congress upon this hundred thousand petitioners for this measure.