This purpose was so diabolical, that, when first announced, it was treated as a caprice of certain hot spirits, irritated by the declamations of the Abolitionists.  But it is idle to refer to transient heat thoughts which bear all the signs of cool atrocity; and needless to seek for the causes of actions in extraneous sources, when they are plainly but steps in the development of principles already known.  Slave-breeding and Slavery-extension are necessities of the system.  Like Romulus and Remus, “they are both suckled from one wolf.”

But it was just here that the question became to the Free States a practical question.  There could be no “fanaticism” in meeting it at this stage.  What usually goes under the name of fanaticism is the habit of uncompromising assault on a thing because its principles are absurd or wicked; what usually goes under the name of common sense is the disposition to assail it at that point where, in the development of its principles, it has become immediately and pressingly dangerous.  Now by no sophistry could we of the Free States evade the responsibility of being the extenders of Slavery, if we allowed Slavery to be extended.  If we did not oppose it from a sense of right, we were bound to oppose it from a sense of decency.  It may be said that we had nothing to do with Slavery at the South; but we had something to do with rescuing the national character from infamy, and unhappily we could not have anything to do with rescuing the national character from infamy without having something to do with Slavery at the South.  The question with us was, whether we would allow the whole force of the National Government to be employed in upholding, extending, and perpetuating this detestable and nonsensical enormity?—­especially, whether we would be guilty of that last and foulest atheism to free principles, the deliberate planting of slave institutions on virgin soil?  If this question had been put to any despot of Europe,—­we had almost said, to any despot of Asia,—­his answer would undoubtedly have been an indignant negative.  Yet the South confidently expected so to wheedle or bully us into dragging our common sense through the mud and mire of momentary expedients, that we should connive at the commission of this execrable crime!

There can be no doubt, that, if the question had been fairly put to the inhabitants of the Free States, their answer would have been at once decisive for freedom.  Even the strongest conservatives would have been “Free-Soilers,”—­not only those who are conservatives in virtue of their prudence, moderation, sagacity, and temper, but prejudiced conservatives, conservatives who are tolerant of all iniquity which is decorous, inert, long-established, and disposed to die when its time comes, conservatives as thorough in their hatred of change as Lamennais himself.  “What a noise,” says Paul Louis Courier, “Lamennais would have made on the day of creation, could he have witnessed it.