dollars per acre.  I was told by a friend, a few days before I left home, who had formerly resided in the county of Bourbon, Kentucky—­a most excellent county of lands adjoining, I believe, the county in which the Senator resides—­that the white population of that county was more than four hundred less than it was five years since.  Will the Senator contend, after a knowledge of these facts, that slavery in this country has been the cause of our prosperity and happiness?  No, he cannot.  It is because slavery has been excluded and driven from a large proportion of our country, that we are a prosperous and happy people.  But its late attempts to force its influence and power into the free States, and deprive our citizens of their unquestionable rights, has been the moving cause of all the riots, burnings, and murders that have taken place on account of abolitionism; and it has, in some degree, even in the free States, caused mourning, lamentation, and woe.  Remove slavery, and the country, the whole country, will recover its natural vigor, and our peace and future prosperity will be placed on a more extensive, safe, and sure foundation.  It is a waste of time to answer the allegations that the emancipation of the negro race would induce them to make war on the white race.  Every fact in the history of emancipation proves the reverse; and he that will not believe those facts, has darkened his own understanding, that the light of reason can make no impression:  he appeals to interest, not to truth, for information on this subject.  We do not fear his errors, while we are left free to combat them.  The Senator implores us to cease all commotion on this subject.  Are we to surrender all our rights and privileges, all the official stations of the country, into the hands of the slaveholding power, without a single struggle?  Are we to cease all exertions for our own safety, and submit in quiet to the rule of this power?  Is the calm of despotism to reign over this land, and the voice of freemen to be no more heard!  This sacrifice is required of us, in order to sustain slavery. Freemen, will you make it?  Will you shut your ears and your sympathies, and withhold from the poor, famished slave, a morsel of bread?  Can you thus act, and expect the blessings of heaven upon your country?  I beseech you to consider for yourselves.

Mr. President, I have been compelled to enter into this discussion from the course pursued by the Senate on the resolutions I submitted a few days since.  The cry of abolitionist has been raised against me.  If those resolutions are abolitionism, then I am an abolitionist from the sole of my feet to the crown of my head.  If to maintain the rights of the States, the security of the citizen from violence and outrage; if to preserve the supremacy of the laws; if insisting on the right of petition, a medium through which every person subject to the laws has an undoubted right to approach the constitutional authorities of the country, be the doctrines of abolitionists, it finds a response in every beating pulse in my veins.  Neither power, nor favor, nor want, nor misery, shall deter me from its support while the vital current continues to flow.