measure.  But in a few days orders came on from Washington, commanding them to approve the measure; the party lash was applied, and it was brought up again in caucus, and passed by a large majority.  The masses were against it, but party necessity carried it; and it was passed through the lower house of Congress against the will of the people, for the same reason.  Here is where the greatest danger lies—­that, while we profess to be a government of law and reason, law will give way to violence on demand of this awful and crushing power.  Like the great Juggernaut—­I think that is the name—­the great idol, it crushes everything that comes in its way, and makes a—­or as I read once, in a black-letter law book, “a slave is a human being who is legally not a person, but a thing.”  And if the safeguards to liberty are broken down, as is now attempted, when they have made things of all the free negroes, how long, think you, before they will begin to make things of poor white men? [Applause.] Be not deceived.  Revolutions do not go backward.  The founder of the Democratic party declared that all men were created equal.  His successor in the leadership has written the word “white” before men, making it read “all white men are created equal.”  Pray, will or may not the Know-nothings, if they should get in power, add the word “protestant,” making it read “all protestant white men”?

Meanwhile the hapless negro is the fruitful subject of reprisals in other quarters.  John Pettit, whom Tom Benton paid his respects to, you will recollect, calls the immortal Declaration “a self-evident lie;” while at the birth-place of freedom—­in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of the “cradle of liberty,” at the home of the Adamses and Warren and Otis—­Choate, from our side of the house, dares to fritter away the birthday promise of liberty by proclaiming the Declaration to be “a string of glittering generalities;” and the Southern Whigs, working hand in hand with pro-slavery Democrats, are making Choate’s theories practical.  Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, mindful of the moral element in slavery, solemnly declared that he “trembled for his country when he remembered that God is just;” while Judge Douglas, with an insignificant wave of the hand, “don’t care whether slavery is voted up or voted down.”  Now, if slavery is right, or even negative, he has a right to treat it in this trifling manner.  But if it is a moral and political wrong, as all Christendom considers it to be, how can he answer to God for this attempt to spread and fortify it? [Applause.]

But no man, and Judge Douglas no more than any other, can maintain a negative, or merely neutral, position on this question; and, accordingly, he avows that the Union was made by white men and for white men and their descendants.  As matter of fact, the first branch of the proposition is historically true; the government was made by white men, and they were and are the superior race.  This I admit.  But the corner-stone of the government, so to speak, was the declaration that “all men are created equal,” and all entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” [Applause.]