The fact that we get no votes in
your section is a fact of your making, and not of ours.

And if there be fault in that fact, that fault is primarily yours, and
remains so until you show that we repel you by some wrong principle or
practice. If we do repel you by any wrong principle or practice, the
fault is ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have
started--to a discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If our
principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of
ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are
sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then,
on the question of whether our principle, put in practice, would wrong
your section; and so meet us as if it were possible that something may
be said on our side. Do you accept the challenge? No! Then you really
believe that the principle which "our fathers who framed the government
under which we live" thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and
indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is in fact so
clearly wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment's
consideration.

Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against sectional
parties given by Washington in his Farewell Address. Less than eight
years before Washington gave that warning he had, as President of the
United States, approved and signed an act of Congress enforcing the
prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory, which act embodied
the policy of the government upon that subject up to and at the very
moment he penned that warning; and about one year after he penned it, he
wrote Lafayette that he considered that prohibition a wise measure,
expressing in the same connection 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, a