his hope that we should
at some time have a confederacy of free States.

Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen
upon this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against
us, or in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would
he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy,
or upon you, who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington,
and we commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the
right application of it.

But you say you are conservative--eminently conservative--while we are
revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is
conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the
new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on
the point in controversy which was adopted by "our fathers who framed
the Government under which we live;" while you with one accord reject,
and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting
something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that
substitute shall be. You are divided on new propositions and plans,
but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the
fathers. Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave-trade; some
for a congressional slave-code for the Territories; some for Congress
forbidding the Territories to prohibit slavery within their limits;
some for maintaining slavery in the Territories through the judiciary;
some for the "gur-reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave
another, no third man should object," fantastically called "Popular
Sovereignty;" but never a man among you is in favor of Federal
prohibition of slavery in Federal Territories, according to the
practice of "our fathers who framed the Government under which we
live." Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an
advocate in the century within which our Government originated.
Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and
your charge of destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear
and stable foundations.

Again, you say we have made the slavery question more prominent than it
formerly was. We deny it. We admit that it is more prominent, but we
deny that we made it so. It was not we, but you, who discarded the old
policy of the fathers. We resisted, and still resist, your innovation;
and thence comes the greater prominence of the qu