Would it be to promote the civilization and progress of the negro race?  The tendency must be otherwise.  By the dispersion of the slaves, their labor would be rendered more productive and their comforts increased.  The number of owners would be multiplied, and by more immediate contact and personal relation greater care and kindness would be engendered.  In every way it would conduce to the advancement and happiness of the servile caste.

No—­no—­it is not these, but the same answer which comes to every inquiry as to the cause of fanatical agitation.  ’Tis for sectional power, and political ascendency; to fan a sectional hostility, which must be, as it has been, injurious to all, and beneficial to none.  For what patriotic purpose can the Northern mind be agitated in relation to domestic institutions, for which they have no legal or moral responsibility, and from the interference with which they are restrained by their obligations as American citizens?

Is it in this mode that the spirit of mutual support and common effort for the common good, is to be cultivated?  Is it thus that confidence is to be developed and the sense of security to grow with the growing power of each and every State?  Is it thus that we are to exemplify the blessings of self-government by the free exercise in each independent community of the power to regulate their domestic institutions as soil, climate, and population may determine?

Among the questions which have been made the basis of recent agitation, and has contributed as much, perhaps, as any other to popular delusion, was the act known as the Missouri Compromise.  It will be remembered that the agitation of 1819 on the subject of slavery, was not masked as it has been since, by pretensions of philanthropy—­it was an avowed opposition to the admission of a slave-holding State.  A long and bitter controversy was terminated by the admission of the State of Missouri, and the prohibition of slavery north of the parallel of 36 deg. 30 minutes.  He, and those with whom he most concurred, had always contended that Congress had no constitutional power to make the interdiction.  But the people having generally acquiesced, the matter was considered settled; and when Texas, a slave-holding State, was admitted into the Union, Southern men, regarding the Missouri Act as a compact, assented to the extension of the line through the territory of Texas, with a provision that any State formed out of the territory north of 36:  30:  should be non-slaveholding.  But when, at a subsequent period, we made extensive acquisitions from Mexico, and it was proposed to divide the territory by the same parallel, the North generally opposed it, and after a long discussion, the controversy was settled on the principle of non-intervention by Congress in relation to property in the territories.  The line of the Missouri Compromise was repudiated.  And a Senator who had been most prominent in denouncing the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a violation of good faith on the part of the South, in 1850, described it as a measure which had been the grave of every Northern man who supported it, and objected to the boundary of 36:  30:  for the territory of Utah, because of the political implication which its adoption would contain.