ce in the natural features of the States. I agree to all
that. Have these very matters ever produced any difficulty amongst us? Not
at all. Have we ever had any quarrel over the fact that they have laws
in Louisiana designed to regulate the commerce that springs from the
production of sugar? Or because we have a different class relative to the
production of flour in this State? Have they produced any differences? Not
at all. They are the very cements of this Union. They don't make the house
a house divided against itself. They are the props that hold up the house
and sustain the Union.

But has it been so with this element of slavery? Have we not always had
quarrels and difficulties over it? And when will we cease to have quarrels
over it? Like causes produce like effects. It is worth while to observe
that we have generally had comparative peace upon the slavery question,
and that there has been no cause for alarm until it was excited by the
effort to spread it into new territory. Whenever it has been limited to
its present bounds, and there has been no effort to spread it, there has
been peace. All the trouble and convulsion has proceeded from efforts to
spread it over more territory. It was thus at the date of the Missouri
Compromise. It was so again with the annexation of Texas; so with the
territory acquired by the Mexican war; and it is so now. Whenever there
has been an effort to spread it, there has been agitation and resistance.
Now, I appeal to this audience (very few of whom are my political
friends), as national men, whether we have reason to expect that the
agitation in regard to this subject will cease while the causes that tend
to reproduce agitation are actively at work? Will not the same cause that
produced agitation in 1820, when the Missouri Compromise was formed, that
which produced the agitation upon the annexation of Texas, and at other
times, work out the same results always? Do you think that the nature of
man will be changed, that the same causes that produced agitation at one
time will not have the same effect at another?

This has been the result so far as my observation of the slavery question
and my reading in history extends. What right have we then to hope that
the trouble will cease,--that the agitation will come to an end,--until
it shall either be placed back where it originally stood, and where
the fathers originally placed it, or, on the other hand, until it shall
entirely master all o