have founded slavery. Indeed, our revolutionary predecessors had precisely the same question 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 legislative 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 extin

guishment. 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

dignity and power in the state. Let them take hope to themselves, give hope to the free states, awaken hope throughout the world. They will thus anticipate only what must happen at some time, and what they themselves must desire, if it can come safely, and as soon as it can come without danger. Let them do only this, and every cause of disagreement will cease immediately and forever. We shall then not merely endure each other, but we shall be reconciled together and shall realize once more the concord which results from mutual league, united councils, and equal hopes and hazards in the most sublime and beneficent enterprise the earth has witnessed. The fingers of the powers above would tune the harmony of such a peace."

As a senator, Mr. Seward's uniform urbanity, his self-possession and tact as a debater-the many able, clear, and elaborate arguments, which he has made upon great public questions, have deepened to enthusiasm the attachment of his friends, and correspondingly excited the opposition and the fears of his political foes. On a recent occasion-February 6, 1855 -on the question of his reëlection to the United States senate, this feeling was especially manifest; but his election, on that occasion, by a large majority, is at once a flattering endorsement of his course in the national councils, and an evidence of the deep and ardent devotion of his political friends.

It is perhaps useless to speculate upon the future; but we sometimes imagine that Mr. Seward will yet

take a postion before the American people immeasurably superior to any which he has yet filled. The spirit of slavery is aggressive. Each day is a witness to its hungry cry for blood, and each day is witness to its triumphs. So far, the north has succumbed, not without ado, but she has invariably in the end succumbed. But it will not be so always. A profound reaction will by-and-by take place—perhaps next year, perhaps ten years hence-but it will surely come, and a great man will be needed for such a crisis. No compromiser, but a statesman of the first order; calm, generous, but sternly resolved upon the divorce of the federal government from all connection with negro slavery. We cannot tell if Mr. Seward is great enough for such a crisis, but we have sometimes thought that such would be his destiny.