Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them?  We know they will not.  In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned.  Invasions and insurrections are the rage now.  Will it satisfy them if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and, insurrections?  We know it will not.  We so know because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them?  Simply this:  We must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone.  This, we know by experience, is no easy task.  We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success.  In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them.  Alike unavailing to convince them is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them?  This, and this only:  cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.  And this must be done thoroughly—­done in acts as well as in words.  Silence will not be tolerated—­we must place ourselves avowedly with them.  Senator Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits; or in private.  We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure.  We must pull down our free State constitutions.  The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way.  Most of them would probably say to us, “Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery.”  But we do let them alone have never disturbed them—­so that after all it is what we say which dissatisfies them.  They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.

I am also aware they have not as yet, in terms, demanded the overthrow of our free State constitutions.  Yet those constitutions declare the wrong of slavery, with more solemn emphasis than do all other sayings against it; and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these constitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to resist the demand.  It is nothing to the contrary, that they do not demand the whole of this just now.  Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation.  Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right and a social blessing.