give it to the mere possessors of goods and chattels.  Fixing upon thirty thousand persons, as the smallest number that shall send one member into the House of Representatives, it protects slavery by distributing legislative power in a free and in a slave State thus:  To a congressional district in South Carolina, containing fifty thousand slaves, claimed as the property of five hundred whites, who hold, on an average, one hundred apiece, it gives one Representative in Congress; to a district in Massachusetts containing a population of thirty thousand five hundred, one Representative is assigned.  But inasmuch as a slave is never permitted to vote, the fifty thousand persons in a district in Carolina form no part of “the constituency;” that is found only in the five hundred free persons.  Five hundred freemen of Carolina could send one Representative to Congress, while it would take thirty thousand five hundred freemen of Massachusetts, to do the same thing:  that is, one slaveholder in Carolina is clothed by the Constitution with the same political power and influence in the Representatives Hall at Washington, as sixty Massachusetts men like you and me, who “eat their bread in the sweat of their own brows.”

According to the census of 1830, and the ratio of representation based upon that, slave property added twenty-five members to the House of Representatives.  And as it has been estimated, (as an approximation to the truth,) that the two and a half million slaves in the United States are held as property by about two hundred and fifty thousand persons—­giving an average of ten slaves to each slaveholder, those twenty-five Representatives, each chosen, at most by only ten thousand voters, and probably by less than three-fourths of that number, were the representatives not only of the two hundred and fifty thousand persons who chose them, but of property which, five years ago, when slaves were lower in market, than at present, were estimated, by the man who is now the most prominent candidate for the Presidency, at twelve hundred millions of dollars—­a sum, which, by the natural increase of five years, and the enhanced value resulting from a more prosperous state of the planting interest, cannot now be less than fifteen hundred millions of dollars.  All this vast amount of property, as it is “peculiar,” is also identical in its character.  In Congress, as we have seen, it is animated by one spirit, moves in one mass, and is wielded with one aim; and when we consider that tyranny is always timid, and despotism distrustful, we see that this vast money power would be false to itself, did it not direct all its eyes and hands, and put forth all its ingenuity and energy, to one end—­self-protection and self-perpetuation.  And this it has ever done.  In all the vibrations of the political scale, whether in relation to a Bank or Sub-Treasury, Free Trade or a Tariff, this immense power has moved, and will continue to move, in one mass, for its own protection.