your children to set limits to this crime against human
nature, than now for you? Our fathers made a political,
and a commercial, and a moral error—shall we repeat it?
They did a wrong; shall we extend and multiply the wrong? Was it an error in our fathers; not barely a wrong—was it a sin? No, not in them; they knew it not. But what in them to establish was only an error, in us to extend or to foster is a sin!
Perpetuate Slavery, we cannot do it. Nothing will save it. It is girt about by a ring of fire which daily grows narrower, and sends terrible sparkles into the very centre of the shameful thing, "Joint resolutions" cannot save it; annexations cannot save it—not if we re-annex all the West Indies; delinquent representatives cannot save it; uninstructed senators, refusing instructions, cannot save it—no, not with all their logic, all their eloquence, which smites as an earthquake smites the sea. No, Slavery cannot be saved; by no compromise, no non-intervention, no Mason's Bill in the Senate. It cannot be saved in this age of the world until you nullify every ordinance of nature, until you repeal the will of God, and dissolve the union He has made between righteousness and the welfare of a people. Then, when you displace God from the throne of the world, and instead of His eternal justice, re-enact the will of the Devil, then you may keep Slavery; keep it for ever, keep it in peace. Not till then.
The question is, not if slavery is to cease, and soon to cease, but shall it end as it ended in Massachusetts, in New Hampshire, in Pennsylvania, in New York; or shall it end as in St. Domingo? Follow the counsel of Mr. Webster—it will end in fire and blood. God forgive us for our cowardice, if we let it come to this, that three millions or thirty millions of degraded human beings, degraded by us, must wade through slaughter to their unalienable rights.
Mr. Webster has spoken noble words—at Plymouth, standing on the altar-stone of New England ; at Bunker Hill, the spot so early reddened with the blood of our fathers. But at this hour, when we looked for great counsel, when we forgot the paltry things which he has often done and said, "Now he will rouse his noble soul, and be the man his early speeches once bespoke," who dared to fear
