is sufficient for the present purpose, to know, that it is now proposed to make slavery our own original act. How a fresh case of actual transgression, which cannot cast upon the shoulders of any progenitors, nor upon any mother country, distant in time or place. The Congress of the United States, the people of the United States, at this day, in this vaunted period of light, will be responsible for it, so that it shall be said thereafter, so long as the dismal history of the slavery is read, that, in the year of Christ 1854, a new and deliberate act was passed, by which a vast territory was opened to its inroads.
Alone in the company of nations does our country assume this hateful championship. In despotic Russia, the serfdom which constitutes the "peculiar institution" if that great empire, is never allowed to travel with the imperial flag, according to the American pretension, into provinces newly acquired by the common blood and treasure, but is carefully restricted by positive prohibition, in harmony with the general conscience, within its ancient confines; and this prohibition—the Wilmot Proviso of Russia—is rigorously enforced on every side, in all the provinces, as in Besarabia on the south, and Poland on the west, so that, in fact, no Russian nobleman has been able to move into these important territories with his slaves. Thus Russia speaks for freedom, and disowns the slave-holding dogma of our country. Far away in the East, at the "gateways of the day," in
