The Missouri Compromise ought to be restored.  Slavery may or may not be established in Nebraska.  But whether it be or not, we shall have repudiated—­discarded from the councils of the nation—­the spirit of compromise; for who, after this, will ever trust in a national compromise?  The spirit of mutual concession—­that spirit which first gave us the Constitution, and has thrice saved the Union—­we shall have strangled and cast from us for ever.  And what shall we have in lieu of it?  The South flushed with triumph and tempted to excess; the North betrayed, as they believed, brooding on wrong and burning for revenge.  One side will provoke, the other resent.  The one will taunt, the other defy; one aggresses, the other retaliates.  Already a few in the North defy all constitutional restraints, resist the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, and even menace the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.  Already a few in the South claim the constitutional right to take and hold slaves in the free States, demand the revival of the slave-trade, and demand a treaty with Great Britain by which fugitive slaves may be reclaimed from Canada.  As yet they are but few on either side.  It is a grave question for lovers of the Union, whether the final destruction of the Missouri Compromise, and with it the spirit of all compromise, will or will not embolden and embitter each of these, and fatally increase the number of both.

...  Some men, mostly Whigs, who condemn the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, nevertheless hesitate to go for its restoration, lest they be thrown in company with the Abolitionists.  Will they allow me, as an old Whig, to tell them good-humouredly that I think this is very silly?  Stand with anybody that stands right.  Stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.  Stand with the Abolitionist in restoring the Missouri Compromise, and stand against him when he attempts to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law.  In the latter case you stand with the Southern disunionist.  What of that?  You are still right.  In both cases you are right In both cases you expose the dangerous extremes.  In both you stand on the middle ground and hold the ship level and steady.  In both you are national, and nothing less than national.  This is the good old Whig ground.  To desert such ground because of any company is to be less than a Whig, less than a man, less than an American.

I particularly object to the new position which the avowed principle of this Nebraska law gives to slavery in the body politic.  I object to it because it assumes that there can be moral right in the enslaving of one man by another.  I object to it as a dangerous dalliance for free people—­a sad evidence that, feeling over-prosperity, we forget right; that liberty as a principle we have ceased to revere.  I object to it because the Fathers of the Republic eschewed and rejected it.  The argument of “necessity” was the only argument they ever admitted in favour of slavery, and so far, and so far only as it carried them, did they ever go.  They found the institution existing among us, which they could not help, and they cast the blame on the British king for having permitted its introduction.  Thus we see the plain, unmistakable spirit of their age towards slavery was hostility to the principle, and toleration only by necessity.