ressed. Utterances of conscience must be heard. They
break forth with irrepressible might. As well attempt to check the tides
of ocean, the currents of the Mississippi, or the rushing waters of
Niagara. The discussion of Slavery will proceed, wherever two or three
are gathered together,--by the fireside, on the highway, at the public
meeting, in the church. The movement against Slavery is from the
Everlasting Arm. Even now it is gathering its forces, soon to be
confessed everywhere. It may not be felt yet in the high places of
office and power, but all who can put their ears humbly to the ground
will hear and comprehend its incessant and advancing tread.

The relations of the National Government to Slavery, though plain and
obvious, are constantly misunderstood. A popular belief at this moment
makes Slavery a national institution, and of course renders its support
a national duty. The extravagance of this error can hardly be surpassed.
An institution which our fathers most carefully omitted to name in the
Constitution, which, according to the debates in the Convention,
they refused to cover with any "sanction," and which, at the original
organization of the Government, was merely sectional, existing nowhere
on the national territory, is now, above all other things, blazoned as
national. Its supporters pride themselves as national. The old political
parties, while upholding it, claim to be national. A National Whig
is simply a Slavery Whig, and a National Democrat is simply a Slavery
Democrat, in contradistinction to all who regard Slavery as a sectional
institution, within the exclusive control of the States and with which
the nation has nothing to do.

As Slavery assumes to be national, so, by an equally strange perversion,
Freedom is degraded to be sectional, and all who uphold it, under the
National Constitution, are made to share this same epithet. Honest
efforts to secure its blessings everywhere within the jurisdiction of
Congress are scouted as sectional; and this cause, which the founders
of our National Government had so much at heart, is called Sectionalism.
These terms, now belonging to the common places of political speech, are
adopted and misapplied by most persons without reflection. But here is
the power of Slavery. According to a curious tradition of the French
language, Louis XIV., the Grand Monarch, by an accidental error of
speech, among supple courtiers, changed the gender of a noun. But
slavery doe