nce, and the difficulty of
its removal, will carry the vote in its favor. Keep it out until a vote is
taken, and a vote in favor of it cannot be got in any population of forty
thousand on earth, who have been drawn together by the ordinary motives of
emigration and settlement. To get slaves into the Territory simultaneously
with the whites in the incipient stages of settlement is the precise stake
played for and won in this Nebraska measure.

The question is asked us: "If slaves will go in notwithstanding the
general principle of law liberates them, why would they not equally go in
against positive statute law--go in, even if the Missouri restriction were
maintained!" I answer, because it takes a much bolder man to venture
in with his property in the latter case than in the former; because the
positive Congressional enactment is known to and respected by all, or
nearly all, whereas the negative principle that no law is free law is not
much known except among lawyers. We have some experience of this practical
difference. In spite of the Ordinance of '87, a few negroes were brought
into Illinois, and held in a state of quasi-slavery, not enough, however,
to carry a vote of the people in favor of the institution when they came
to form a constitution. But into the adjoining Missouri country, where
there was no Ordinance of '87,--was no restriction,--they were carried
ten times, nay, a hundred times, as fast, and actually made a slave State.
This is fact-naked fact.

Another lullaby argument is that taking slaves to new countries does not
increase their number, does not make any one slave who would otherwise
be free. There is some truth in this, and I am glad of it; but it is not
wholly true. The African slave trade is not yet effectually suppressed;
and, if we make a reasonable deduction for the white people among us who
are foreigners and the descendants of foreigners arriving here since 1808,
we shall find the increase of the black population outrunning that of the
white to an extent unaccountable, except by supposing that some of them,
too, have been coming from Africa. If this be so, the opening of new
countries to the institution increases the demand for and augments the
price of slaves, and so does, in fact, make slaves of freemen, by causing
them to be brought from Africa and sold into bondage.

But however this may be, we know the opening of new countries to slavery
tends to the perpetuation of the institution, and