The truth is that this question is one of national importance, and we cannot help dealing with it; we must do something about it, whether we will or not.  We cannot avoid it; the subject is one we cannot avoid considering; we can no more avoid it than a man can live without eating.  It is upon us; it attaches to the body politic as much and closely as the natural wants attach to our natural bodies.  Now I think it important that this matter should be taken up in earnest, and really settled:  And one way to bring about a true settlement of the question is to understand its true magnitude.

There have been many efforts made to settle it.  Again and again it has been fondly hoped that it was settled; but every time it breaks out afresh, and more violently than ever.  It was settled, our fathers hoped, by the Missouri Compromise, but it did not stay settled.  Then the compromises of 1850 were declared to be a full and final settlement of the question.  The two great parties, each in national convention, adopted resolutions declaring that the settlement made by the Compromise of 1850 was a finality that it would last forever.  Yet how long before it was unsettled again?  It broke out again in 1854, and blazed higher and raged more furiously than ever before, and the agitation has not rested since.

These repeated settlements must have some faults about them.  There must be some inadequacy in their very nature to the purpose to which they were designed.  We can only speculate as to where that fault, that inadequacy, is, but we may perhaps profit by past experiences.

I think that one of the causes of these repeated failures is that our best and greatest men have greatly underestimated the size of this question.  They have constantly brought forward small cures for great sores—­plasters too small to cover the wound.  That is one reason that all settlements have proved temporary—­so evanescent.

Look at the magnitude of this subject:  One sixth of our population, in round numbers—­not quite one sixth, and yet more than a seventh,—­about one sixth of the whole population of the United States are slaves.  The owners of these slaves consider them property.  The effect upon the minds of the owners is that of property, and nothing else it induces them to insist upon all that will favorably affect its value as property, to demand laws and institutions and a public policy that shall increase and secure its value, and make it durable, lasting, and universal.  The effect on the minds of the owners is to persuade them that there is no wrong in it.  The slaveholder does not like to be considered a mean fellow for holding that species of property, and hence, he has to struggle within himself and sets about arguing himself into the belief that slavery is right.  The property influences his mind.  The dissenting minister who argued some theological point with one of the established church was always met with the reply, “I can’t