at question of the repeal,
although we do not yet represent many numbers who have taken a distinct
position on the question.

We are in a trying time--it ranges above mere party--and this movement
to call a halt and turn our steps backward needs all the help and good
counsels it can get; for unless popular opinion makes itself very strongly
felt, and a change is made in our present course, blood will flow on
account of Nebraska, and brother's hands will be raised against brother!

[The last sentence was uttered in such an earnest, impressive, if not,
indeed, tragic, manner, as to make a cold chill creep over me. Others gave
a similar experience.]

I have listened with great interest to the earnest appeal made to Illinois
men by the gentleman from Lawrence [James S. Emery] who has just addressed
us so eloquently and forcibly. I was deeply moved by his statement of the
wrongs done to free-State men out there. I think it just to say that all
true men North should sympathize with them, and ought to be willing to
do any possible and needful thing to right their wrongs. But we must not
promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot;
we must be calm and moderate, and consider the whole difficulty, and
determine what is possible and just. We must not be led by excitement
and passion to do that which our sober judgments would not approve in our
cooler moments. We have higher aims; we will have more serious business
than to dally with temporary measures.

We are here to stand firmly for a principle--to stand firmly for a right.
We know that great political and moral wrongs are done, and outrages
committed, and we denounce those wrongs and outrages, although we cannot,
at present, do much more. But we desire to reach out beyond those personal
outrages and establish a rule that will apply to all, and so prevent any
future outrages.

We have seen to-day that every shade of popular opinion is represented
here, with Freedom, or rather Free Soil, as the basis. We have come
together as in some sort representatives of popular opinion against the
extension of slavery into territory now free in fact as well as by law,
and the pledged word of the statesmen of the nation who are now no more.
We come--we are here assembled together--to protest as well as we can
against a great wrong, and to take measures, as well as we now can, to
make that wrong right; to place the nation, as far as it may be possible
now, as