avery will not go to Kansas and
Nebraska, in any event. This is a palliation, a lullaby. I have some hope
that it will not; but let us not be too confident. As to climate, a glance
at the map shows that there are five slave States--Delaware, Maryland,
Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, and also the District of Columbia, all
north of the Missouri Compromise line. The census returns of 1850 show
that within these there are eight hundred and sixty-seven thousand two
hundred and seventy-six slaves, being more than one fourth of all the
slaves in the nation.

It is not climate, then, that will keep slavery out of these Territories.
Is there anything in the peculiar nature of the country? Missouri adjoins
these Territories by her entire western boundary, and slavery is already
within every one of her western counties. I have even heard it said that
there are more slaves in proportion to whites in the northwestern county
of Missouri than within any other county in the State. Slavery pressed
entirely up to the old western boundary of the State, and when rather
recently a part of that boundary at the northwest was moved out a little
farther west, slavery followed on quite up to the new line. Now, when the
restriction is removed, what is to prevent it from going still farther?
Climate will not, no peculiarity of the country will, nothing in nature
will. Will the disposition of the people prevent it? Those nearest the
scene are all in favor of the extension. The Yankees who are opposed to it
may be most flumerous; but, in military phrase, the battlefield is too far
from their base of operations.

But it is said there now is no law in Nebraska on the subject of slavery,
and that, in such case, taking a slave there operates his freedom. That is
good book-law, but it is not the rule of actual practice. Wherever slavery
is it has been first introduced without law. The oldest laws we find
concerning it are not laws introducing it, but regulating it as an already
existing thing. A white man takes his slave to Nebraska now. Who will
inform the negro that he is free? Who will take him before court to test
the question of his freedom? In ignorance of his legal emancipation he is
kept chopping, splitting, and plowing. Others are brought, and move on in
the same track. At last, if ever the time for voting comes on the question
of slavery the institution already, in fact, exists in the country, and
cannot well be removed. The fact of its prese