Did any one suppose that we could retard the ever-onward movement of their unscrupulous force and defiant wills by timely compromises and concessions?  Every compromise we made with them only stimulated their rapacity, heightened their arrogance, increased their demands.  Every concession we made to their insolent threats was only a step downwards to a deeper abasement; and we parted with our most cherished convictions of duty to purchase, not their gratitude, but their contempt.  Every concession, too, weakened us and strengthened them for the inevitable struggle, into which the Free States were eventually goaded, to preserve what remained of their dignity, their honor, and their self-respect.  In 1850 we conceded the application of the Wilmot Proviso; in 1856 we were compelled to concede the principle of the Wilmot Proviso.  In 1850 we had no fears that slaves would enter New Mexico; in 1861 we were threatened with a view of the flag of the rattlesnake floating over Faneuil Hall.  If any principle has been established by events, with the certainty of mathematical demonstration, it is this, that concession to the Slave Power is the suicide of Freedom.  We are purchasing this fact at the expense of arming five hundred thousand men and spending a thousand millions of dollars.  More than this, if any concessions were to be made, they ought, on all principles of concession, to have been made to the North.  Concessions, historically, are not made by freedom to privilege, but by privilege to freedom.  Thus King John conceded Magna Charta; thus King Charles conceded the Petition of Right; thus Protestant England conceded Catholic Emancipation to Ireland; thus aristocratic England conceded the Reform Bill to the English middle class.  And had not we, the misgoverned many, a right to demand from the slaveholders, the governing few, some concessions to our sense of justice and our prejudices for freedom?  Concession indeed!  If any class of men hold in their grasp one of the dear-bought chartered “rights of man,” it is infamous to concede it.

  “Make it the darling of your precious eye!
  To lose or give ’t away were such perdition
  As nothing else could match.”

Considerations so obvious as these could not, by any ingenuity of party-contrivance, be prevented from forcing themselves by degrees into the minds of the great body of the voters of the Free States.  The common sense, the “large roundabout common sense” of the people, slowly, and somewhat reluctantly, came up to the demands of the occasion.  The sophistries and fallacies of the Northern defenders of the pretensions of the slave-holding sectional minority were gradually exposed, and were repudiated in the lump.  The conviction was implanted in the minds of the people of the Free States, that the Slave Power, representing only a thirtieth part of the population of the Slave States, and a ninth part of the property of the country, was bent on governing the nation, and on subordinating