emancipation, they have assumed the latter horn of the dilemma, and now contend that slavery is unprofitable, that it tends to impoverish the State, and weaken the resources of the Government. The means upon which they now rely to arrest the progress of slavery, and curtail the powers and influence of the slave States, is not the persuasion of the people of those States, but the numerical power of the free States acting through the Federal Government.
"The great principle upon which the Northern movement rests, which is already adopted by most northern politicians, and to which they all seem likely to be driven by the force of the popular current there, if the question is unsettled till the next Congressional election, is this: That the Government of the United States must do nothing to sanction slavery; that it must therefore exclude it from the Territories; that it must abolish it in the District of Columbia, forts, and arsenals, and wherever it has jurisdiction. Some, too, carrying the principle to its extent, insist that the coasting slave trade, and that between the States, should be abolished, and also in custom-houses, post-offices, and the like. As these things all obviously rest on the same general dogma, it is clear that the yielding of one or more points would not check, but would merely accelerate, the general movement to the end of the series. Before this end was reached, they would probably append, as a corollary, the principle that the President should not appoint a slaveholder to office. It is, sir, my deliberate judgment, that, in the present temper of the public mind at the North, if the
