Also, about a month after the introduction of the bill, on the Judge’s own motion it is so amended as to declare the Missouri Compromise inoperative and void; and, substantially, that the people who go and settle there may establish slavery, or exclude it, as they may see fit.  In this shape the bill passed both branches of Congress and became a law.

This is the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.  The foregoing history may not be precisely accurate in every particular, but I am sure it is sufficiently so for all the use I shall attempt to make of it, and in it we have before us the chief material enabling us to judge correctly whether the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is right or wrong.  I think, and shall try to show, that it is wrong—­wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world where men can be found inclined to take it.

This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal, for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate.  I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.  I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially because it forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.

Before proceeding let me say that I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people.  They are just what we would be in their situation.  If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it.  If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up.  This I believe of the masses North and South.  Doubtless there are individuals on both sides who would not hold slaves under any circumstances, and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew if it were out of existence.  We know that some Southern men do free their slaves, go North and become tip-top abolitionists, while some Northern ones go South and become most cruel slave masters.

When Southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact.  When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying.  I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.  If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution.  My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land.  But a moment’s reflection would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I