aintain
your lawful rights. Permit me to say you have no rights in territory
which we never owned, and I hope never may. This is no question of
honor or equality. But if we should acquire territory and should then
exclude you from it, will it not then be time enough to resort to the
expedient of national suicide as a remedy for the wrong? Nor do you
require it for any particular purpose. You have within your States
room for all the increase of a century. Your interest is to retain
your sons at home and develop the wealth and advance the prosperity of
your States, and not to send them to the western wilderness where
one-half die in the process of acclimation. The fact that you are all
in favor of placing in the Constitution new _restrictions_ as to the
_acquisition_ of territory, proves you do not consider you need more
territory. I heard it said, the other day, by a gentleman from
Virginia, that the South wanted the provision for a finality, to end
forever this dispute about slavery. With all my heart I sympathize
with him in his desire to end this discussion forever. You think you
have suffered from these discussions at the South; so have we at the
North. It has separated families and neighborhoods; it has broken up
and scattered Christian churches; it has severed every benevolent
society of the land; it has destroyed parties; it broke up the good
old Whig party, and more recently sapped the strength and vigor from
the Herculean Democracy. It now threatens the dissolution of the
Union. Let us crush the head of the monster forever. Let us do it by
restricting and defining its limits in existing territory.

Suppose the word "future" had been inserted. You do not wish to
destroy all probability of the adoption of this proposition at the
North. These proposals could not pass Congress, with the word
"future," by the requisite vote; and if it passed Congress, there is
no hope that twenty-five out of twenty-eight States would have adopted
it. With it you would have given great strength to the opposition at
the North. It would have created a more powerful anti-slavery party
than ever before existed. No, you are better off by confining the
provisions of this compromise to present territory--you having, as
well as the North, in the contemplated amendment a veto on the
acquisition of territory.

The North will want new territory before you will desire it. They will
demand Mexico and Cuba for the advantages of trade. You then, h