takes away no rights whatever which the free States ever should
attempt to use, whilst it vests exclusively in the slave States the
right to use them or not, as they shall think proper, the whole
treatment of the subject to which they relate being conceded to be a
matter of common interest to them, exclusively within their
jurisdiction, and subject to their control. A time may arrive, in
the course of years, when they will themselves desire some act of
interference in a friendly and beneficent spirit. If so, they have
the power reserved to them of initiating the very form in which it
would be most welcome. If not, they have a security, so long as this
government shall endure, that no sister State shall dictate any
change against their will.

I have now considered all the alleged grievances which have thus far
been brought to our attention, 1. The personal liberty laws, which
never freed a slave. 2. Exclusion from a Territory which
slaveholders will never desire to occupy. 3. Apprehension of an
event which will never take place. For the sake of these three
causes of complaint, all of them utterly without practical result,
the slaveholding States, unquestionably the weakest section of this
great Confederacy, are voluntarily and precipitately surrendering
the realities of solid power woven into the very texture of a
government that now keeps nineteen million freemen, willing to
tolerate, and, in one sense, to shelter, institutions which, but for
that, would meet with no more sympathy among them than they now do
in the remainder of the civilized world.

For my own part, I must declare that, even supposing these alleged
grievances to be more real than I represent them, I think the
measures of the committee dispose of them effectually and