erty so rarely in extremity? There is
not another such place on earth! I desire that if you get too thick here,
and find it hard to better your condition on this soil, you may have a
chance to strike and go somewhere else, where you may not be degraded, nor
have your families corrupted, by forced rivalry with negro slaves. I want
you to have a clean bed and no snakes in it! Then you can better your
condition, and so it may go on and on in one endless round so long as man
exists on the face of the earth!

Now, to come back to this shoe strike,--if, as the senator from Illinois
asserts, this is caused by withdrawal of Southern votes, consider
briefly how you will meet the difficulty. You have done nothing, and have
protested that you have done nothing, to injure the South. And yet, to get
back the shoe trade, you must leave off doing something which you are
now doing. What is it? You must stop thinking slavery wrong! Let your
institutions be wholly changed; let your State constitutions be subverted;
glorify slavery, and so you will get back the shoe trade--for what? You
have brought owned labor with it, to compete with your own labor, to
underwork you, and to degrade you! Are you ready to get back the trade on
those terms?

But the statement is not correct. You have not lost that trade; orders
were never better than now! Senator Mason, a Democrat, comes into the
Senate in homespun, a proof that the dissolution of the Union has actually
begun! but orders are the same. Your factories have not struck work,
neither those where they make anything for coats, nor for pants nor
for shirts, nor for ladies' dresses. Mr. Mason has not reached the
manufacturers who ought to have made him a coat and pants! To make his
proof good for anything he should have come into the Senate barefoot!

Another bushwhacking contrivance; simply that, nothing else! I find a good
many people who are very much concerned about the loss of Southern trade.
Now either these people are sincere or they are not. I will speculate a
little about that. If they are sincere, and are moved by any real danger
of the loss of Southern trade, they will simply get their names on the
white list, and then, instead of persuading Republicans to do likewise,
they will be glad to keep you away! Don't you see that they cut off
competition? They would not be whispering around to Republicans to come
in and share the profits with them. But if they are not sincere, and are
merely