Whenever this question shall be settled, it must be settled on some philosophical basis.  No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical opinion can be permanently maintained.  And hence there are but two policies in regard to slavery that can be at all maintained.  The first, based on the property view that slavery is right, conforms to that idea throughout, and demands that we shall do everything for it that we ought to do if it were right.  We must sweep away all opposition, for opposition to the right is wrong; we must agree that slavery is right, and we must adopt the idea that property has persuaded the owner to believe that slavery is morally right and socially elevating.  This gives a philosophical basis for a permanent policy of encouragement.

The other policy is one that squares with the idea that slavery is wrong, and it consists in doing everything that we ought to do if it is wrong.  Now, I don’t wish to be misunderstood, nor to leave a gap down to be misrepresented, even.  I don’t mean that we ought to attack it where it exists.  To me it seems that if we were to form a government anew, in view of the actual presence of slavery we should find it necessary to frame just such a government as our fathers did—­giving to the slaveholder the entire control where the system was established, while we possessed the power to restrain it from going outside those limits.  From the necessities of the case we should be compelled to form just such a government as our blessed fathers gave us; and, surely, if they have so made it, that adds another reason why we should let slavery alone where it exists.

If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question.  I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them.  Much more if I found it in bed with my neighbor’s children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone.  But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide!

That is just the case.  The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not.  It does not seem as if there could be much hesitation what our policy should be!