hand upon myself, and the blood were coursing less freely than its wont through my veins, when I endeavor to suppose that such a compromise has been effected, and my utterance forever is arrested upon all the great questions, social, moral, and political, arising out of a subject so important, and yet so incomprehensible. What am I receive in this compromise? Freedom in California. It is well; it is a noble acquisition; it is worth a sacrifice. But what am I to give as an equivalent? A recognition of a claim to perpetuate slavery in the District of Columbia; forbearance towards more stringent laws concerning the arrest of persons suspected of being slaves found. in the free states; forbearance from the proviso of freedom in the charters of new territories. None of the plans of compromise offered demand less than two, and most of them insist on all these conditions. The equivalent then is, some portion of liberty, some portion of human rights in one region for liberty in another."

In this speech occurred Mr. Seward's famous enunciation of the HIGHER LAW doctrine. We will give the extract:

"It is true indeed that the national domain is ours. It is true it was acquired by the valor and with the wealth of the whole nation. But we hold, nevertheless, no arbitrary power over it. We hold no arbitrary power over anything, whether acquired by law or seized by usurpation. The constitution regulates our stewardship; the constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to defense, to welfare and to liberty. BUT THERE IS A HIGHER LAW THAN THE CONSTITUTION, WHICH

REGULATES OUR AUTHORITY OVER THE DOMAIN, AND DEVOTES IT TO THE SAME NOBLE PURPOSES. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part, of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards, and must so discharge our trust, as to secure in the highest attainable degree their happiness. This is a state, and we are deliberating for it, just as our fathers deliberated in establishing the institutions we enjoy. Whatever superiority there is in our condition and hopes over those of any other 'kingdom' or 'estate,' is due to the fortunate circumstance that our ancestors did not leave things to 'take their chance,' but that they added amplitude and greatness' to our common wealth by introducing such ordinances, constitutions, and cus toms as were wise.' We in our turn have succeeded to the same responsibilities, and we cannot approach the duty before us wisely or justly, except we raise ourselves to the great consideration of how we can most certainly 'sow greatness to our posterity and successors.'

"And now the simple, bold, and even awful question which presents itself to us is this: Shall we, who are founding institutions, social and political, for countless millions; shall we, who know by experience the wise and the just, and are free to choose them, and to reject the erroneous and unjust; shall we establish human bondage, or permit it by our sufferance to be established? Sir, our forefathers would not have hesitated an hour. They found slavery existing here, and they left it only because they could not remove it. There is not only no free state which would now establish it, but there is no slave state which, if it had had the free alternative, as we now have, would

have founded slavery. Indeed, our revolutionary predecessors had precisely the same que-tion before them in establishing an organic law, under which the states of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa have since come into the Union, and they solemnly repudiated and excluded slavery from those states forever."

In a speech made in the senate, July 2, 1850, occurs the following eloquent passage:

"Still it is replied that the slavery question must be settled. That question cannot be settled by this bill. Slavery and freedom are conflicting systems, brought together by the union of the states, not neutralized, nor even harmonized. Their antagonism is radical, and therefore perpetual. Compromise continues conflict, and the conflict involves unavoidably all questions of national interest-questions of revenue, of internal improvement, of industry, of commerce, of political rivalry, and even all questions of peace and of war. In entering the career of conquest you have kindled to a fierce heat the fires you seek to extinguish, because you have thrown into them the fuel of propagandism. We have the propagandism of slavery to enlarge the slave market, and to increase slave representation in congress, and in the electoral colleges-for the bramble ever seeks power, though the olive, the fig, and the vine, refuse it; and we have the propagandism of freedom to counteract those purposes. Nor can this propagandism be arrested on either side. The sea is full of exiles, and they swarm over our land. Emigration from Europe and from Asia, from Polynesia even, from the free states, and from the slave states, goes on, and

will go on, IN OBEDIENCE TO LAWS WHICH I SHOULD SAY WERE

HIGHER THAN THE CONSTITUTION, IF ANY SUCH LAWS WERE AC

KNOWLEDGED HERE. And I may be allowed here to refer those who have been scandalized by the allusion to such laws to a single passage by an author whose opinions did not err on the side of superstition or of tyranny: 'If it be said that every nation ought in this to follow their own constitutions, we are at an end of our controversies; for they ought not to be followed unless they are rightly made; they cannot be rightly made if they are contrary to the universal law of God and nature.' (Discourses on Government, by Algernon Sydney, chap. 1, p. 48.) I spoke of emigrants; and wherever those emigrants go-whether they go from necessity or of choice they form continuous, unbroken, streaming processions of colonists, founders of states, builders of nations. And when colonies are planted, states are founded, or nations built, labor is there the first and indispensable element, and it begins and prosecutes to the end its strife for freedom and power. While the sovereignty of the territories remains here, the strife will come up here to be composed. You may slay the Wilmot proviso in the senate-chamber, and bury it beneath the capitol to-day; the dead corse, in complete steel, will haunt your le gislative halls to-morrow. When the strife is ended in the territories you now possess, it will be renewed on new fields, north as well as south, to fortify advantages gained, or to retrieve losses incurred, for both of the parties well know that there is 'Yet in that word Hereafter.'

"Senators have referred us to the promise of peace heralded in the Missouri compromise. Sir, that prophecy is but half

its journey yet. The annexation of Texas, the invasion of Mexico, this prolonged struggle over California, this desperate contest for the sands and snows of New Mexico and Deseret, are all within the scope and limits of the prediction; and so are the strifes yet to come over ice-bound regions beyond the St. Lawrence and sun-burnt plains beneath the tropics.

"But while this compromise will fail of all its purposes, it will work out serious and lasting evils. All such compromises are changes of the constitution made in derogation of the constitution. They render it uncertain in its meaning, and impair its vigor as well as its sanctions. This compromise finds the senate in wide divergence from the house of representatives by reason of the undue multiplication of feeble, consumptive states, effected by former compromises of the same sort.

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Sir, the agitations which alarm us are not signs of evils to come, but mild efforts of the commonwealth for relief from

mischiefs past.

"There is a way, and one way only, to put them at rest. Let us go back to the ground where our forefathers stood. While we leave slavery to the care of the states where it exists, let us inflexibly direct the policy of the federal government to circumscribe its limits and favor its ultimate extinguishment. Let those who have this misfortune entailed upon them instead of contriving how to maintain an equilibrium that never had existence, consider carefully how, at some time-it may be ten, or twenty, or even fifty years hence -by some means, by means all their own, and without our aid, without sudden change or violent action, they may bring about the emancipation of labor, and its restoration to its just