us, by all classes of society, forming part of all our contracts within our own country and in Europe.  I should have been glad, sir, to have been spared the hearing of a declaration of this kind, especially from the high source and the place from which it emanated.  But the assertion has gone forth that we have twelve hundred millions of slave property at the South; and can any man so close his understanding here as not plainly to perceive that the power of this vast amount of property at the South is now uniting itself to the banking power of the North, in order to govern the destinies of this country.  Six hundred millions of banking capital is to be brought into this coalition, and the slave power and the bank power are thus to unite in order to break down the present administration.  There can be no mistake, as I believe, in this matter.  The aristocracy of the North, who, by the power of a corrupt banking system, and the aristocracy of the South, by the power of the slave system, both fattening upon the labor of others, are now about to unite in order to make the reign of each perpetual.  Is there an independent American to be found, who will become the recreant slave to such an unholy combination?  Is this another compromise to barter the liberties of the country for personal aggrandisement?  “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.”

The Senator further insists, “that what the law makes property is property.”  This is the predicate of the gentleman; he has neither facts nor reason to prove it; yet upon this alone does he rest the whole case that negroes are property.  I deny the predicate and the argument.  Suppose the Legislature of the Senator’s own State should pass a law declaring his wife, his children, his friends, indeed, any white citizen of Kentucky, property, and should they be sold and transferred as such, would the gentleman fold his arms and say, “Yes, they are property, for the law has made them such?” No, sir; he would denounce such law with more vehemence than he now denounces abolitionists, and would deny the authority of human legislation to accomplish an object so clearly beyond its power.

Human laws, I contend, cannot make human beings property, if human force can do it.  If it is competent for our legislatures to make a black man property, it is competent for them to make a white man the same; and the same objection exists to the power of the people in an organic law for their own government; they cannot make property of each other; and, in the language of the Constitution of Indiana, such an act “can only originate in usurpation and tyranny.”  Dreadful, indeed, would be the condition of this country, if these principles should not only be carried into the ballot box, but into the presidential chair.  The idea that abolitionists ought to pay for the slaves if they are set free, and that they ought to think of this, is addressed to their fears, and not to their judgment.  There is no principle of morality or justice that should require them or our citizens generally to do so.  To free a slave is to take from usurpation that which it has made property and given to another, and bestow it upon the rightful owner.  It is not taking property from its true owner for public use.  Men can do with their own as they please, to vary their peace if they wish, but cannot be compelled to do so.