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d free speech. Where the one exists the other cannot. The vitality of the one rests in pure force, and force and reason never agree. It always has been, and always will be, that force must either suppress reason or reason will subvert force. One of the first acts of the slavery propagandists in Kansas was to pass enactments through their spurious Legislature, making it a felony, punishable by imprisonment and hard labor, for any man to 'assert or maintain by speaking or writing that persons have not the right to hold slaves in this Territory.' It has been so in every Slave State, and worse. _Not only have slave codes interdicted, in every one of them, all adverse discussion of the institution, but a mob power has always been at hand to take summary vengeance upon it with Lynch law. These resorts were not a mere caprice; they were a necessity_. Slavery being once accepted as the prime object, there was no alternative but to protect it just in this manner. _But the war has ended all that. There can be no mobs where the bayonet governs; nor arbitrary local laws where general military law is paramount. The discussion of slavery is as free now in New Orleans as in New York_. It is no more within the province of the military Governor, Shepley, to interfere with fair discussion there, than it is within the rightful power of the civil Governor, Seymour, to interfere with it here. _And in the Border States, where the civil laws still prevail, hostility to the rebellion has excited such a dissatisfaction with slavery as its cause, that by general consent perfect freedom is allowed in arguing against the institution._ The consequence of this freedom has been that Missouri has already determined to abolish it; Maryland and Delaware have put declared emancipationists in places of their highest trusts by unprecedented majorities; and Kentucky is visibly casting about to see how she can best rid herself of the curse. '_We say, then, that even if the National Government had the right to institute new civil measures against slavery, it would not be necessary. The unavoidable military operations of the war, and the free discussion which is sure to attend it, are enough of themselves to break down the institution. The Government has simply to stand quiet, and l
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