where, at the fireside, and in
the halls of legislation, surrounding, like the all-encircling
atmosphere, brother and father, husband and son! And by your love of
them, by every holy sympathy of your bosoms, by every mournful appeal
which comes up to you from hearts whose sanctuary of affections has been
made waste and desolate, you are called upon to exert it in the cause of
redemption from wrong and outrage.

Let the patriot, the friend of liberty and the Union of the States, no
longer shut his eyes to the great danger, the master-evil before which
all others dwindle into insignificance. Our Union is tottering to its
foundation, and slavery is the cause. Remove the evil. Dry up at their
source the bitter waters. In vain you enact and abrogate your tariffs;
in vain is individual sacrifice, or sectional concession. The accursed
thing is with us, the stone of stumbling and the rock of offence remains.
Drag, then, the Achan into light; and let national repentance atone for
national sin.

The conflicting interests of free and slave labor furnish the only ground
for fear in relation to the permanency of the Union. The line of
separation between them is day by day growing broader and deeper;
geographically and politically united, we are already, in a moral point
of view, a divided people. But a few months ago we were on the very
verge of civil war, a war of brothers, a war between the North and the
South, between the slave-holder and the free laborer. The danger has
been delayed for a time; this bolt has fallen without mortal injury to
the Union, but the cloud from whence it came still hangs above us,
reddening with the elements of destruction.

Recent events have furnished ample proof that the slave-holding interest
is prepared to resist any legislation on the part of the general
government which is supposed to have a tendency, directly or indirectly,
to encourage and invigorate free labor; and that it is determined to
charge upon its opposite interest the infliction of all those evils which
necessarily attend its own operation, "the primeval curse of Omnipotence
upon slavery."

We have already felt in too many instances the extreme difficulty of
cherishing in one common course of national legislation the opposite
interests of republican equality and feudal aristocracy and servitude.
The truth is, we have undertaken a moral impossibility. These interests
are from their nature irreconcilable. The one is based