o other? You will not let us do a single
thing as if it was wrong; there is no place where you will even allow it
to be called wrong! We must not call it wrong in the free States, because
it is not there, and we must not call it wrong in the slave States,
because it is there; we must not call it wrong in politics because that
is bringing morality into politics, and we must not call it wrong in the
pulpit because that is bringing politics into religion; we must not bring
it into the Tract Society or the other societies, because those are such
unsuitable places--and there is no single place, according to you, where
this wrong thing can properly be called wrong!

Perhaps you will plead that if the people of the slave States should
themselves set on foot an effort for emancipation, you would wish
them success, and bid them God-speed. Let us test that: In 1858 the
emancipation party of Missouri, with Frank Blair at their head, tried to
get up a movement for that purpose, and having started a party contested
the State. Blair was beaten, apparently if not truly, and when the news
came to Connecticut, you, who knew that Frank Blair was taking hold of
this thing by the right end, and doing the only thing that you say can
properly be done to remove this wrong--did you bow your heads in sorrow
because of that defeat? Do you, any of you, know one single Democrat that
showed sorrow over that result? Not one! On the contrary every man threw
up his hat, and hallooed at the top of his lungs, "Hooray for Democracy!"

Now, gentlemen, the Republicans desire to place this great question of
slavery on the very basis on which our fathers placed it, and no other. It
is easy to demonstrate that "our fathers, who framed this Government
under which we live," looked on slavery as wrong, and so framed it and
everything about it as to square with the idea that it was wrong, so far
as the necessities arising from its existence permitted. In forming the
Constitution they found the slave trade existing, capital invested in it,
fields depending upon it for labor, and the whole system resting upon
the importation of slave labor. They therefore did not prohibit the slave
trade at once, but they gave the power to prohibit it after twenty years.
Why was this? What other foreign trade did they treat in that way? Would
they have done this if they had not thought slavery wrong?

Another thing was done by some of the same men who framed the
Constitution, and