current of feeling and opinion. Not only have the slave States held the
balance of political power, but the spread of slavery has been gigantic.
The fairest regions of the South have been opened up to the domestic
institution, and Texas annexed, with Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida,
making an immense area of country, to be the nursery of slavery. The
political ascendency of the slave States has ever given to the South a
great advantage, in the extension of their favored institution, and the
result has proved that what our ancestors looked upon as an evil that
time would soon do away with, has grown into a monster system that
threatens to make subservient to it the free institutions of the North.

Slavery has now come to be a mighty energy of disquietude all over the
country, assuming colossal proportions of mischief, and mocking all the
ordinary restraints of law. The question of the present day to be
decided is not whether freedom and slavery shall exist side by side, nor
whether slavery shall be tolerated as a necessary evil; but in reality,
whether freedom shall be crushed under the iron hoof of slavery, and
this institution shall obtain the complete control of the country. It
has been said that the Constitution takes the position of complete
indifference to slavery; but the history of the slave States does not
lead us to infer that they were ever willing that slavery should be
tested by its own merits, or stand without the most persistent efforts
to secure for it the patronage of the Federal Government. Study the
progress of slavery, the last forty years, and none can fail to see that
it has ever aimed to secure first the supreme political control, and
then to advance its own selfish interests, at the expense of free
institutions. The great danger has always been, that while numerically
vastly inferior to the North, slavery has always been an unit, with a
single eye to its own aggrandizement; consequently, the history of the
country will show that so far from the general policy of the government