case.

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The view that we in the Southern States took of it was sustained—that in the Territories, the common property of the Union, pending their Territorial condition, neither Congress nor the Territorial Government had the power to confiscate any description of property recognized in the States of the Union. The court drew no distinction between slaves and other property. It is true some foreign philanthropists and some foreign writers do undertake to draw this distinction, but these distinctions have nothing to do with our system of government. Our government rests not upon the speculations of philanthropic writers, but upon the plain understanding of a written Constitution which determines it, and upon that alone. It is the result of positive law; therefore we are not to look to the analogy of the supposed law of nations, but to regard the Constitution itself, which is the written expression of the respective powers of the Government and the rights of the States.

Well, that being the case, and it having been authoritatively determined by the very tribunal to which it was referred, that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the Territories, and judicially determined that the Territorial

Legislatures, authorities created by Congress, had not the power to exclude or confiscate slave property, I confess that I had not anticipated that the doctrine of "unfriendly legislation" would be set up. Hence I need not say

to

you that I do not believe in the doctrine of unfriendly legislation; that I do not believe in the authority of the Territorial Legislatures to do by indirection what they cannot do directly. I repose upon the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, as to the point that neither Congress nor the Territorial Legislature has the right to obstruct or confiscate the property of any citizen, slaves included, pending the Territorial condition. I do not see any escape from that decision, if you admit that the question was a judicial one; if you admit the decision of the Supreme Court; and if you stand by the decision of the highest court of the country. The Supreme Court seems to have recognized it as the duty-as the duty-of the courts of this Union in their proper sphere to execute this constitutional right, thus adjudicated by the Supreme Court, in the following language: "The judicial department

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to maintain in the

* the political rights and rights

of property of individual citizens as secured by the Constitution." So that, in regard to slave property, as in regard to any other property recognized and guarded by the Constitution, it is the duty, according to the Supreme Court, of all the courts of the country to protect and guard it by their decisions, whenever the question is brought before them. To which I will only add this-that the judicial decisions in our favor must be maintained-these judicial decisions in our favor must be sustained.

ated by prejudices against that party, or by prepossessions in favor of its adversary; for I have learned, by some experience, that virtue and patriotism, vice and selfishness, are found in all parties, and that they differ less in their motives than in the policies they pursue.

Our country is a theatre, which exhibits, in full operation, two radically different political systems; the one resting on the basis of servile or slave labor, the other on voluntary labor of freemen. The laborers who are enslaved are all negroes, or persons more or less purely of African derivation. But this is only accidental. The principle of the system is, that labor in every society, by whomsoever performed, is necessarily unintellectual, grovelling and base; ⚫and that the laborer, equally for his own good and for the welfare of the State, ought to be enslaved. The white laboring man, whether native or foreigner, is not enslaved, only because he cannot, as yet, be reduced to bondage.

You need not be told now that the slave system is the older of the two, and that once it was universal. The emancipation of our own ancestors, Caucasians and Europeans as they were, hardly dates beyond a period of five hundred years. The great melioration of human socie1-