f persons,--and this is the case in the present instance.

But granting that the terms of the Constitution are ambiguous--that
they are susceptible of two meanings, if the unanimous, concurrent,
unbroken practice of every department of the Government, judicial,
legislative, and executive, and the acquiescence of the whole people
for fifty years do not prove which is the true construction, then how
and where can such a question ever be settled? If the people and the
Courts of the land do not know what they themselves mean, who has
authority to settle their meaning for them?

If then the people and the Courts of a country are to be allowed to
determine what their own laws mean, it follows that at this time and
for the last half century, the Constitution of the United States, has
been, and still is, a pro-slavery instrument, and that any one who
swears to support it, swears to do pro-slavery acts, and violates his
duty both as a man and an abolitionist. What the Constitution may
become a century hence, we know not; we speak of it _as it is_, and
repudiate it _as it is_.

But the purpose, for which we have thrown these pages before the
community, is this. Some men, finding the nation unanimously deciding
that the Constitution tolerates slavery, have tried to prove that this
false construction, as they think it, has been foisted in upon the
instrument by the corrupting influence of slavery itself, tainting all
it touches. They assert that the known anti-slavery spirit of
revolutionary times never _could_ have consented to so infamous a
bargain as the Constitution is represented to be, and has in its
present hands become. Now these pages prove the melancholy fact that
willingly, with deliberate purpose, our fathers bartered honesty for
gain and became partners with tyrants that they might share in the
profits of their tyranny.

And in view of this fact, will it not require a very strong argument
to make any candid man believe, that the bargain which the fathers
tell us they meant to incorporate into the Constitution, and which the
sons have always thought they found there incorporated, does not exist
there after all? Forty of the shrewdest men and lawyers in the land
assemble to make a bargain, among other things, about slaves,--after
months of anxious deliberation they put it into writing and sign their
names to the instrument,--fifty years roll away, twenty millions at
least of their children pass over the stage of life