passed through the lower house of Congress against the will of the
people, for the same reason. Here is where the greatest danger
lies--that, while we profess to be a government of law and reason, law
will give way to violence on demand of this awful and crushing power.
Like the great Juggernaut--I think that is the name--the great idol, it
crushes everything that comes in its way, and makes a--or as I read
once, in a black-letter law book, "a slave is a human being who is
legally not a _person_, but a _thing_." And if the safeguards to liberty
are broken down, as is now attempted, when they have made _things_ of
all the free negroes, how long, think you, before they will begin to
make _things_ of poor white men? [Applause.] Be not deceived.
Revolutions do not go backward. The founder of the Democratic party
declared that _all_ men were created equal. His successor in the
leadership has written the word "white" before men, making it read "all
_white_ men are created equal." Pray, will or may not the Know-nothings,
if they should get in power, add the word "protestant," making it read
"_all protestant white men_"?

Meanwhile the hapless negro is the fruitful subject of reprisals in
other quarters. John Pettit, whom Tom Benton paid his respects to, you
will recollect, calls the immortal Declaration "a self-evident lie;"
while at the birth-place of freedom--in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of
the "cradle of liberty," at the home of the Adamses and Warren and
Otis--Choate, from our side of the house, dares to fritter away the
birthday promise of liberty by proclaiming the Declaration to be "a
string of glittering generalities;" and the Southern Whigs, working hand
in hand with pro-slavery Democrats, are making Choate's theories
practical. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, mindful of the moral element
in slavery, solemnly declared that he "trembled for his country when he
remembered that God is just;" while Judge Douglas, with an insignificant