od; and no single
instance of actual wrong to the South, by the violation, of any
acknowledged constitutional right, can be designated, in the whole
action of the Federal Government from the time of its establishment down
to the commencement of this rebellion.

Nor can it be denied, that while in power with the Democratic party and
ascendant in its counsels, the South has been exacting in the extreme,
and has often made demands wholly incompatible with the true interests
of liberty and humanity. Witness the offensive form in which the
fugitive slave law was passed, and its execution enforced in the North,
wholly regardless of the natural and irrepressible sympathies of a
humane people; and, on the other hand, the unnecessary and sinister
excitement deliberately aroused and kept up, in the extreme Southern
States, on this subject of fugitives, although it is well known that no
considerable losses of that kind have ever been suffered in that
quarter. So likewise as to slavery in the Territories. It has often been
admitted by Southern statesmen of the extreme school, that the
Territories recently organized, over which so much bitter controversy
has occurred, are altogether unsuited in climate and productions for the
employment of slave labor; and few will deny, whether those Territories
be physically adapted or not adapted to the labor of Africans, that the
South had not the means of populating them without an increase of slaves
from their native continent, or by a resort to some other source of
ample supply. Here, then, was a most violent and persistent effort to
secure the acknowledgment of a right to do what they had not the means
to accomplish, and what they could not obtain the means of doing without
the actual overthrow of the Government, as well as a flagrant violation
of the moral sentiments of mankind.

On this score, therefore, the account seems to be tolerably well
balanced; for if Northern men have sometimes wantonly started hostile
and injurious agitation, calculated to arouse fierce passions and to
close the ears of the Southern people to the voice of reason; these, on
the other hand, are liable to equal or greater censure for having made
impossible demands, as unnecessary as they were inadmissible, and liable
from their very extravagance to be considered as mere pretexts,
deliberately adopted with a view to aggravate the quarrel and prevent a
reconciliation. It is difficult to admit any other explanation of