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Pinkney, owning that slavery is wrong, but urging that there is no constitutional power to restrict it.

It is curious to find, in these two great speeches on the different sides of this great question, that there were adduced two mere suppositions of fancy, which to the orators seemed impossibilities, but which the generation which has passed has shown as realities.

Mr. Pinkney was arguing that slavery could exist in a republic, in reply to Mr. Morril, of New Hampshire, who had defined a republic as a state where all the men united in the government.

"I beg leave," said Mr. Pinkney, "if we are to entertain these hopeful abstractions, if it be true that all the men in a republican government must help to wield its power, and be equal in rights, I beg leave to ask the honorable member from New Hampshire, and why not all the women? They too are God's creatures, and not only very fair but very rational creatures; and our great ancestor, if we are to give credit to Milton, accounted them the 'wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best; ' although, to say the truth, he had but one specimen from which to draw his conclusion, and possibly if he had had more would not have drawn it at all." * * * Continuing in the strain, he pushes his argument, ad absurdum, so far as to say, "If the ultra-republican doctrines which have now been broached should ever gain ground among us, I should not be surprised if some romantic reformer, treading in the

footsteps of Mrs. Woolstoncraft, should propose to repeal our republican law salique, and claim for our wives and daughters a full participation in political power, and to add it to that domestic power, which in some families, as I have heard, is as absolute and unrepublican as any power can be."

The idea is thrown out as a complete impossibility, only possible as a consequence of the wild theory of freedom. A generation has called into being the reformers whose existence seemed to him so incredible.

On the other hand, in Mr. Otis's reply, he also makes the supposition of an impossibility which a generation has exhibited in reality. "There were," he said, "it was well known, in many parts of this country, societies of people called Shakers, of good moral characters, exemplary habits of industry, whose fundamental doctrines were founded on the duty of celibacy. They are also a rich people, and in some "of the states experience interruptions in their endeavors to increase their numbers, and inconvenience from laws which press upon their consciences, especially in military concerns. Imagine, sir," said he, "these societies combined and determined to make a pilgrimage and become sojourners in the new country of promise. Figure to yourself four or five thousand adults of both sexes with their children in spirit,—— a dismal procession marching beyond the Mississippi, until they shall find a spot suited to their occasions; then

halting and sending a missionary to you, with the intelli

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gence of their demand' to be admitted as a state. Are you bound to admit them without a stipulation that they shall make no laws prohibiting marriage, at the moment you knew this to be the main design of their emigration, and thus secure a sect of those peculiar and unsocial tenets a monopoly of that entire state, and a power of virtually excluding from its territory the great mass of your citizens?"

In this passage, Mr. Otis presented as a policy wholly insupportable and indefensible the very policy which has permitted the establishment of the Mormon state of Utah. For the argument applies as well to the Mormon laws regarding marriage, as to the laws of celibacy sustained by the Shakers. And a "monopoly of that entire state, and a power of virtually excluding from its territories the great mass of the citizens of the United States," has been granted, in exactly the way which then seemed fanciful, and even impossible.

Both in Senate and House, the tone of oratory was even more rabid and rancorous than we have heard in the last

few years.

John Randolph, half mad, as his friends said, cried, "God has given us the Missouri, and the devil cannot take it from us." On the other hand, northern language was decided, in reply.

"If the alternative," says Mr. Lowrie, of Pennsylvania, in the House, "be the dissolution of this Union or extension of slavery over the whole western country, I choose the

former." With the true oratory of the stump, Mr. Walker, of Georgia, cries, "He must be badly acquainted with signs of the times who does not perceive a storm portending, and callous to all the finer feelings of our nature who does not dread the bursting of that storm.

"I cannot but imagine to myself intestine feuds, civil wars, and all the black catalogue of evils consequent on such a state of things. I behold the father armed against the son, and the son against the father. I see the brother drawing his sword from his brother's breast. I perceive our houses wrapt in flames and our wives and infant children driven from their homes, forced to submit to the pelting of the pitiless storm, with no other shelter but the canopy of heaven, with nothing to sustain them but the cold charity of an unfeeling world." On the other hand, Mr. Taylor, who had first moved the "Restriction," with curious foresight, inveighing against the extension of slave representation, states this climax of its claims: "On an implied power to acquire territory by treaty, you raise an implied right to erect it into states, and imply a compromise by which slavery is to be established and its slaves represented in Congress. Is this just? Is it fair? Where will it end? * * * Your lust of acquiring is not yet satiated. You must have the Floridas. Your ambition rises. You covet Cuba and obtain it. You stretch your arms to the other islands in the Gulf of Mexico, and they become yours. Are the millions of slaves inhabiting those countries to be incor

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porated into the Union and represented in Congress? Are the freemen of the old states to become the slaves of the representatives of foreign slaves? You may have the power to pass such laws, but beware how you use it."

Mr. Barbour, of Virginia, had called the restriction "a spark ignited, which shall shake this Union to its

centre.'

"The gentleman talks of sparks ignited," says Mr. Otis in reply. "I can tell him that when the pine forests of Maine are lighted, they will burn with quite as fierce a flame as the spire grass of Missouri.”

In this debate, Pennsylvania was first called the "keystone state," by Mr. Clay, in his great speech, of which this passage, preserved in the reply, is one of the few frag

ments:

"I appeal to Pennsylvania, the unambitious Pennsylvania, -the key-stone of the federal arch, whether she will concur in a measure calculated to disturb the peace of this Union!"

Sir," says John Sergeant in reply, with a direct allusion to Mr. Clay, "this was a single arch, it is becoming a combination of arches; and where the centre now is, whether in Kentucky or Pennsylvania, might be very hard to tell. Pennsylvania feels her responsibility to the Union, but she feels also her responsibility to a great moral principle. That principle she announced the day she expressed her gratitude for independence. 'We feel called