Even the intimation of any such interference as I have mentioned by way of example could not be made in earnest without at once shaking the entire foundation of the whole confederated Union.  No man shall exceed me in jealousy of affection for the State rights of Massachusetts.  So far as I remember, nothing of this kind was ever thought of heretofore; and I see no reason to apprehend that what has not happened thus far will be more likely to happen hereafter.  But if the time ever come when it does occur, I shall believe the dissolution of the system to be much more certain than I do at this moment.

For these reasons, I cannot imagine that there is the smallest foundation for uneasiness about the intentions of any considerable number of men in the free States to interfere in any manner whatever with slavery in the States, much less by the hopeless mode of amending the Constitution.  To me it looks like panic, pure panic.  How, then, is it to be treated?  Is it to be neglected or ridiculed?  Not at all.  If a child in the nursery be frightened by the idea of a spectre, common humanity would prompt an effort by kindness to assuage the alarm.  But in cases where the same feeling pervades the bosoms of multitudes of men, this imaginary evil grows up at once into a gigantic reality, and must be dealt with as such.  It is at all times difficult to legislate against a possibility.  The committee have reported a proposition intended to meet this case.  It is a form of amendment of the Constitution which, in substance, takes away no rights whatever which the free States ever should attempt to use, whilst it vests exclusively in the slave States the right to use them or not, as they shall think proper, the whole treatment of the subject to which they relate being conceded to be a matter of common interest to them, exclusively within their jurisdiction, and subject to their control.  A time may arrive, in the course of years, when they will themselves desire some act of interference in a friendly and beneficent spirit.  If so, they have the power reserved to them of initiating the very form in which it would be most welcome.  If not, they have a security, so long as this government shall endure, that no sister State shall dictate any change against their will.

I have now considered all the alleged grievances which have thus far been brought to our attention, 1.  The personal liberty laws, which never freed a slave. 2.  Exclusion from a Territory which slaveholders will never desire to occupy. 3.  Apprehension of an event which will never take place.  For the sake of these three causes of complaint, all of them utterly without practical result, the slaveholding States, unquestionably the weakest section of this great Confederacy, are voluntarily and precipitately surrendering the realities of solid power woven into the very texture of a government that now keeps nineteen million freemen, willing to tolerate, and, in one sense, to shelter, institutions which, but for that, would meet with no more sympathy among them than they now do in the remainder of the civilized world.