If the North was as devoted
to the cause of Freedom as the South is to Slavery, our national
troubles would vanish like darkness before the sun. Our country
would then become what it _should_ be,--free, happy, prosperous, and
respected by all the world. Then we could say, truthfully, that she
is the home of the free, the land of the brave, the asylum of the
oppressed."
In the same debate, Mr. Maxson, of Allegheny, said:--"All laws,
whether Constitutions or statutes, that invade human rights, are
null. A community has no more power to strike down the rights of man
by Constitutions, than by any other means. Do those who give us
awfully solemn lessons about the inviolability of compacts, mean
that one man is bound to rob another because he has _agreed_ to? In
this age of schools, of churches and of Bibles, do they mean to
teach us that an agreement to rob men of their rights, in whatever
solemn form that agreement may be written out, is binding? Has the
morality of the nineteenth century culminated in _this_, that a mere
compact can convert vice into virtue? These advocates of the
rightfulness of robbery, because it has been _agreed_, to, and that
agreement has been _written down_, have come too late upon the
stage, by more than two hundred years.
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