and turmoil whenever it has made a struggle to spread itself where it was not.  I ask, then, if experience does not speak in thunder-tones telling us that the policy which has given peace to the country heretofore, being returned to, gives the greatest promise of peace again.  You may say, and Judge Douglas has intimated the same thing, that all this difficulty in regard to the institution of slavery is the mere agitation of office-seekers and ambitious Northern politicians.  He thinks we want to get “his place,” I suppose.  I agree that there are office-seekers amongst us.  The Bible says somewhere that we are desperately selfish.  I think we would have discovered that fact without the Bible.  I do not claim that I am any less so than the average of men, but I do claim that I am not more selfish than Judge Douglas.

But is it true that all the difficulty and agitation we have in regard to this institution of slavery spring from office-seeking, from the mere ambition of politicians?  Is that the truth?  How many times have we had danger from this question?  Go back to the day of the Missouri Compromise.  Go back to the nullification question, at the bottom of which lay this same slavery question.  Go back to the time of the annexation of Texas.  Go back to the troubles that led to the Compromise of 1850.  You will find that every time, with the single exception of the Nullification question, they sprung from an endeavor to spread this institution.  There never was a party in the history of this country, and there probably never will be, of sufficient strength to disturb the general peace of the country.  Parties themselves may be divided and quarrel on minor questions, yet it extends not beyond the parties themselves.  But does not this question make a disturbance outside of political circles?  Does it not enter into the churches and rend them asunder?  What divided the great Methodist Church into two parts, North and South?  What has raised this constant disturbance in every Presbyterian General Assembly that meets?  What disturbed the Unitarian Church in this very city two years ago?  What has jarred and shaken the great American Tract Society recently, not yet splitting it, but sure to divide it in the end?  Is it not this same mighty, deep-seated power that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting and stirring them up in every avenue of society,—­in politics, in religion, in literature, in morals, in all the manifold relations of life?  Is this the work of politicians?  Is that irresistible power, which for fifty years has shaken the government and agitated the people, to be stifled and subdued by pretending that it is an exceedingly simple thing, and we ought not to talk about it?  If you will get everybody else to stop talking about it, I assure you I will quit before they have half done so.  But where is the philosophy or statesmanship which assumes that you can quiet that disturbing element in our society which has disturbed us for more than