sober part of the community, in proportion as they have chafed against the bars of their deepening degradation.
Such are some of the crimes of abolitionism, but these are not all, nor the worst. It is responsible for all the turmoil and trepidation attending the passage and the several enforcements of the Fugitive Slave Law. What do I say? Abolitionism is responsible for the Fugitive Slave Law itself. The law sprang out of the monster's own loins, and now it gnashes its teeth upon its own progeny It was abolitionism that forced the law into existence: if the former had not existed, the latter would not have been needed. There would have been few fugitives to catch, and still fewer owners who would have cared to take the trouble to catch them, had they been let alone. And more than this, abolitionism with all its prating about American liberty, is the greatest foe American liberty has to contend against. It is not only a one-idea party, but it is a party demented about an abstraction, without the slightest reference to the modifications which every principle undergoes in practical, and especially in complicated, application. And consequently its spirit is the most turbulent, explosive, disorganizing, and hence reactionary, of all others. Even Abolitionists are compelled to admit that abstractions are often wholly reversed in practice. You may hear one of them arguing that free trade, as an abstract doctrine, is the true law of international exchanges, whilst the circumstances of a particular nation may
