ut the militia, and Congress can only call upon the militia to
suppress insurrection or repel invasion. Pause, gentlemen! Stop where
you are! You will bring strife to your own doors, to your very
hearthstones--bloody, disheartening strife. War will be in your own
homes, among your own families. Under ordinary circumstances you would
hesitate. If the question was about tariff, you would hesitate and
look at the awful consequences. That there is a diversity between us
is very true. What of it? It lies in a nutshell. We can fix it in a
minute, if you will be calm and act like brothers.

The only question, as I understand it, for I have thought and studied
upon it, is this: You of the North will not yield to the South the
small privilege of taking their slaves into the territories of the
common Union. You will not give them a fair chance with you, even in
the Government property--the territories. When the territories become
States they will have to take care of themselves. You cannot theorize
slave soil into free soil, nor _vice versa_. Am I not right? Does the
South ask any control or power over these territories after they have
become States? No, gentlemen; the South demands no such thing. It is
not demanded by her, and never will be. All I ask for the South, and
all she asks for herself, is this: Let us be free to come with our
slaves into all your territories, and hold them there until the
territory is made up into States.

I have shown that if peace be not secured, the uprising of the South
would be a revolution, and cannot be treated as mere insurrection. The
bravado, therefore, of offering armies to the Government, can only
have the effect, at this crisis, of preventing a peaceful adjustment.
Against all such demonstrations we must fix our faces like flint.
Peace we must have. The Union can only be preserved by peace. The
South asks no more than the North will concede, if the people of the
North can express their sentiments. The South only asks for equal
rights, and to be let alone. For thirty years she has asked no more.
The South will soon present its cause in an authoritative shape. Their
conventions will soon declare their propositions. Let the North be
prepared to consider them in conventions representing their people
fairly. If this is done, there is no doubt the present crisis will
pass without danger. Until time for these results can be taken, let
warlike demonstrations be resisted. Let the Government abstai