while names remain the same, the things which they represent in time go through a radical change.  Slavery is not the same that it was when the Constitution was formed, nor are the original slave States the same.  If freedom at the North has made great strides, so also has slavery South.  Our country now witnesses a mighty difference in free and slave institutions from what originally was seen.  The stand-point of slavery and freedom has altogether changed, not from local legislation, but from natural causes, inherent in these two diverse states of society.  New interests, new relations, new views of commerce, agriculture, and manufactures now characterize our country.  It will not do then to infer, from the existing state of things, what was originally the respective condition of the slaveholding and the free States, or what was in fact the import of that agreement, called the Constitution, which brought about the Federal Union.  The framers of the Constitution did not reason so much as to what they should do for posterity as for the generation then living.  As fallible men, much as they would wish to legislate wisely for the future, yet their very imperfection of knowledge precluded them from knowing fully what fifty or a hundred years hence would be the development of slavery or freedom.  Their actions must have reference to present wants, and consult especially existing conditions of society.  While they intended that the Constitution should be the supreme law of the land, yet they wisely put into the hands of the people the power of amending it at any such time as circumstances might make it necessary.  The question then at issue between the North and the South is not what the Constitution should read, not what it ought to be, to come up to the supposed interests of the country; but what it does read.  How is the Constitution truly to be interpreted?  All parties should acquiesce in seeking only to find out the literal import of the Constitution as originally framed, or subsequently amended, and abide by it, irrespective altogether of present interests or relations.  The reason is, in no other way can the common welfare of the country be promoted.  If the necessities of the people demand a change in the Constitution, they can, in a legal way, exercise the right, always remembering that no republic, no free institutions, no democratic state of society can exist that denies the great principle of the rule of the majority.  It becomes us, then, in order that we may come to a right decision respecting the duties that grow out of our Federal Union, to consider what language the Constitution makes use of, in relation to slavery, and how was this instrument interpreted by the framers.  The great question is, was slavery regarded as a political and moral evil, to be restricted and circumscribed within the States existing under the Constitution, or was it looked upon as a blessing, a social relation of society, proper to be diffused over the territories?  It