arty in possession
of the Government. We had been often advised not to form political
combinations on one idea. The people gave heed to this advice; for here
was a triumphant political combination, formed not only on one idea, but
that the worst idea that ever animated any political combination. Here
was an association of three hundred and fifty thousand persons, spread
over some nine hundred and fifty thousand square miles of territory, and
wielding its whole political power, engaged in the work of turning the
United States into a sort of slave plantation, of which they were to be
overseers. We opposed them by argument, passion, and numerical power;
and they read us long homilies on the beauty of law and order,--order
sustained by Border Ruffians, law which was but the legalizing of
criminal instincts,--law and order which, judged by the code established
for Kansas, seemed based on legislative ideas imported from the Fegee
Islands. We opposed them again, and they talked to us about the
necessity of preserving the Union;--as if, in the Free States, the love
of the Union had not been a principle and a passion, proof against many
losses, and insensible to many humiliations; as if, with our teachers,
disunion had not been for half a century a stereotyped menace to scare
us into compliance with their rascalities; as if it were not known that
only so long as they could wield the powers of the National Government
to accomplish their designs, were they loyal to the Union! We opposed
them again, and they clamored about their Constitutional rights and our
Constitutional obligations; but they adopted for themselves a theory of
the Constitution which made each State the judge of the Constitution in
the last resort, while they held us to that view of it which made the
Supreme Court the judge in the last resort. Written constitutions, by a
process of interpretation, are always made to follow the drift of great
forces; they are twisted and tortured into conformity with the views
of the power dominant in the State; and our Constitution, originally
a charter of freedom, was converted into an instrument which the
slaveholders seemed to possess by right of squatter sovereignty and
eminent domain.

Did any one suppose that we could retard the ever-onward movement of
their unscrupulous force and defiant wills by timely compromises and
concessions? Every compromise we made with them only stimulated their
rapacity, heightened their arrogance