was one of the curses from that Pandora’s box, adjusted at the time, as usual, by a compromise, the whole advantage of which inured to the benefit of the South, and to aggravate the burthens of the North.’—­’If there be a parallel to it in human history, it can only be that of the Roman Emperors, who, from the days when Julius Caesar substituted a military despotism in the place of a republic, among the offices which they always concentrated upon themselves, was that of tribune of the people.  A Roman Emperor tribune of the people, is an exact parallel to that feature in the Constitution of the United States which makes the master the representative of his slave.’—­’The Constitution of the United States expressly prescribes that no title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.  The spirit of this interdict is not a rooted antipathy to the grant of mere powerless empty titles, but to titles of nobility; to the institution of privileged orders of men.  But what order of men under the most absolute of monarchies, or the most aristocratic of republics, was ever invested with such an odious and unjust privilege as that of the separate and exclusive representation of less than half a million owners of slaves, in the Hall of this House, in the chair of the Senate, and in the Presidential mansion?’—­’This investment of power in the owners of one species of property concentrated in the highest authorities of the nation, and disseminated through thirteen of the twenty-six States of the Union, constitutes a privileged order of men in the community, more adverse to the rights of all, and more pernicious to the interests of the whole, than any order of nobility ever known.  To call government thus constituted a Democracy, is to insult the understanding of mankind.  To call it an Aristocracy, is to do injustice to that form of government.  Aristocracy is the government of the best.  Its standard qualification for accession to power is merit, ascertained by popular election, recurring at short intervals of time.  If even that government is prone to degenerate into tyranny, what must be the character of that form of polity in which the standard qualification for access to power is wealth in the possession of slaves?  It is doubly tainted with the infection of riches and of slavery. There is no name in the language of national jurisprudence that can define it—­no model in the records of ancient history, or in the political theories of Aristotle, with which it can be likened.  It was introduced into the Constitution of the United States by an equivocation—­a representation of property under the name of persons.  Little did the members of the Convention from the free States imagine or foresee what a sacrifice to Moloch was hidden under the mask of this concession.’—­’The House of Representatives of the U. States consists of 223 members—­all, by the letter of the Constitution, representatives only of persons,