think there is) there may be in this in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible.  If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough to carry them there in many times ten days.  What then?  Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings?  Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?  I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon.  What next?  Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?  My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.  Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question, if indeed it is any part of it.  A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded.  We cannot then make them equals.  It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted, but for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South.

When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them—­not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives which should not in its stringency be more likely to carry a free man into slavery than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.

But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory than it would for reviving the African slave trade by law.  The law which forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa, and that which has so long forbidden the taking of them into Nebraska, can hardy be distinguished on any moral principle, and the repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the latter.

The arguments by which the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is sought to be justified are these: 

First.  That the Nebraska country needed a territorial government.

Second.  That in various ways the public had repudiated that compromise and demanded the repeal, and therefore should not now complain of it.

And, lastly, That the repeal establishes a principle which is intrinsically right.

I will attempt an answer to each of them in its turn.

First, then:  If that country was in need of a territorial organization, could it not have had it as well without as with a repeal?  Iowa and Minnesota, to both of which the Missouri restriction applied, had, without its repeal, each in succession, territorial organizations.  And even the year before, a bill for Nebraska itself was within an ace of passing without the repealing clause, and this in the hands of the same men who are now the champions of repeal.  Why no necessity then for repeal?  But still later, when this very bill was first brought in, it contained no repeal.  But, say they, because the people had demanded, or rather commanded, the repeal, the repeal was to accompany the organization whenever that should occur.