I am also aware that 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.  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.

Nor can we justifiably withhold this on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong.  If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong and should be silenced and swept away.  If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality—­its universality:  if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension—­its enlargement.  All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong.  Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact on which depends the whole controversy.  Thinking it right as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them?  Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own?  In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in these free States?

If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively.  Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—­contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who would be neither a living man nor a dead man—­such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all free men do care—­such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and caning, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance—­such as invocations of Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington did.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves.  Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.