Will the gentlemen tell us that it is the quantity of slaves, not the quality of slavery, which takes from a government the republican form?  Will they tell us (for they have not yet told us) that there are constitutional grounds (to say nothing of common sense) upon which the slavery which now exists in Missouri may be reconciled with a republican form of government, while any addition to the number of its slaves (the quality of slavery remaining the same) from the other States, will be repugnant to that form, and metamorphose it into some nondescript government disowned by the Constitution?  They cannot have recourse to the treaty of 1803 for such a distinction, since independently of what I have before observed on that head, the gentlemen have contended that the treaty has nothing to do with the matter.

They have cut themselves off from all chance of a convenient distinction in or out of that treaty, by insisting that slavery beyond the old United States is rejected by the Constitution, and by the law of God as discoverable by the aid of either reason or revelation; and moreover that the treaty does not include the case, and if it did could not make it better.  They have, therefore, completely discredited their own theory by their own practice, and left us no theory worthy of being seriously controverted.  This peculiarity in reasoning of giving out a universal principle, and coupling with it a practical concession that it is wholly fallacious, has indeed run through the greater part of the arguments on the other side; but it is not, as I think, the more imposing on that account, or the less liable to the criticism which I have here bestowed upon it.

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But let us proceed to take a rapid glance at the reasons which have been assigned for this notion that involuntary servitude and a republican form of government are perfect antipathies.  The gentleman from New Hampshire has defined a republican government to be that in which all the men participate in its power and privileges; from whence it follows that where there are slaves, it can have no existence.  A definition is no proof, however, and even if it be dignified (as I think it was) with the name of a maxim, the matter is not much mended.  It is Lord Bacon who says “That nothing is so easily made as a maxim”; and certainly a definition is manufactured with equal facility.  A political maxim is the work of induction, and cannot stand against experience, or stand on anything but experience.  But this maxim, or definition, or whatever else it may be, sets facts at defiance.  If you go back to antiquity, you will obtain no countenance for this hypothesis; and if you look at home you will gain still less.  I have read that Sparta, and Rome, and Athens, and many others of the ancient family, were republics.  They were so in form undoubtedly—­the last approaching nearer to a perfect democracy than any other government which has yet been known in the world.  Judging of them also by their fruits, they were of the highest order of republics.  Sparta could scarcely be any other than a republic, when a Spartan matron could say to her son just marching to battle, “Return victorious, or return no more.”