ives them a disproportionate representation
because of their property in men, and the unity of interest which
makes them always act in behalf of Slavery as one man, have made them
thus omnipotent. The North, distracted by a thousand interests, has
always been at the mercy of whatever barbarian chief in the capital
could throw his slave whip into the trembling scale of party. The
government having been always, since this century began, at least, the
creature and the tool of the slaveholders, the whole patronage of the
nation, and the treasury filled chiefly by Northern commerce, have
been at their command to help manipulate and mould plastic Northern
consciences into practicable shapes. When the slave interest,
consisting, at its own largest account of itself, of less than THREE
HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND souls, has _thirty_ members of the
Senate, while the free-labor interest, consisting of at least
TWENTY-FOUR MILLIONS, SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND souls, has but
_thirty-two_, and when the former has a delegation of some score
of members to represent its slaves in the House, besides its own fair
proportion, can we marvel that it has achieved the mastery over us,
which is written in black and bloody characters on so many pages of
our history?

Such having been the absolute sway Slavery has exercised over the
facts of our history, what has been its influence upon the characters
of the men with whom it has had to do? Of all the productions of a
nation, its men are what prove its quality the most surely. How have
the men of America stood this test? Have those in the high places,
they who have been called to wait at the altar before all the people,
maintained the dignity of character and secured the general reverence
which marked and waited upon their predecessors in the days of our
small things? The population of the United States has multiplied
itself nearly tenfold, while its wealth has increased in a still
greater proportion, since the peace of 'Eighty-Three. Have the
Representative Men of the nation been made or maintained great and
magnanimous, too? Or is that other anomaly, which has so perplexed the
curious foreigner, an admitted fact, that in proportion as the country
has waxed great and powerful, its public men have dwindled from giants
in the last century to dwarfs in this? Alas, to ask the question is to
answer it. Compare Franklin, and Adams, and Jay, met at Paris to
negotiate the treaty of peace which was t