become so incorporated into its frame, that they cannot be extracted without dissolving the whole fabric; that we must endure the evil without hope and without complaint.  Our very natures must be changed before we can be brought tamely to submit to this doctrine.  The evil will be remedied:  and to use the language of Jefferson again, “this people will yet be free.”  The Senator finds consolation, however in the midst of this existing evil, in color and caste.  The black race (says he) is the strong ground of slavery in our country.  Yes, it is color, not right and justice, that is to continue forever slavery in our country.  It is prejudice against color, which is the strong ground of the slaveholder’s hope.  Is that prejudice founded in nature, or is it the effect of base and sordid interest?  Let the mixed race which we see here, from black to almost perfect white, springing from white fathers, answer the question.  Slavery has no just foundation in color:  it rests exclusively upon usurpation, tyranny, oppressive fraud, and force.  These were its parents in every age and country of the world.

The Senator says, the next or greatest difficulty to emancipation is, the amount of property it would take from the owners.  All ideas of right and wrong are confounded in these words:  emancipate property, emancipate a horse, or an ox, would not only be unmeaning, but a ludicrous expression.  To emancipate is to set free from slavery.  To emancipate, is to set free a man, not property.  The Senator estimates the number of slaves—­men now held in bondage—­at three millions in the United States.  Is this statement made here by the same voice which was heard in this Capitol in favor of the liberties of Greece, and for the emancipation of our South American brethren from political thralldom?  It is; and has all its fervor in favor of liberty been exhausted upon foreign countries, so as not to leave a single whisper in favor of three millions of men in our own country, now groaning under the most galling oppression the world ever saw?  No, sir.  Sordid interest rules the hour.  Men are made property, and paper is made money, and the Senator, no doubt, sees in these two peculiar institutions a power which, if united, will be able to accomplish all his wishes.  He informs us that some have computed the slaves to be worth the average amount of five hundred dollars each.  He will estimate within bounds at four hundred dollars each.  Making the amount twelve hundred millions of dollars’ worth of slave property.  I heard this statement, Mr. President, with emotions of the deepest feeling.  By what rule of political or commercial arithmetic does the Senator calculate the amount of property in human beings?  Can it be fancy or fact, that I hear such calculation, that the people of the United States own twelve hundred millions’ (double the amount of all the specie in the world) worth of property in human flesh!  And this property is owned, the gentleman informs