and surplus money enough to carry them there in many times ten days. What
then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite
certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one
in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to
denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and
socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine
would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.
Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment is not the
sole question, if indeed it is any part of it. A universal feeling,
whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot then
make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation
might be adopted, but for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to
judge our brethren of the South.

When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge
them--not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any
legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives which should not in its
stringency be more likely to carry a free man into slavery than our
ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.

But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting
slavery to go into our own free territory than it would for reviving the
African slave trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves
from Africa, and that which has so long forbidden the taking of them into
Nebraska, can hardy be distinguished on any moral principle, and the
repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the
latter.

The arguments by which the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is sought to
be justified are these: