“It is not that both sides are infatuated and refuse a reasonable settlement; but the skill of Mr. Clay has evidently not touched the seat of the disease. He either has not perceived or else has not thought it expedient to meet the real issue now before the people of the United States. The struggle now going on is a struggle whose depths lie in the organization of society in the North and South respectively; whose causes are planted in the Constitution. There are two incompatible and mutually destructive principles wrought together in the government of this land.... These elements are slavery and liberty.... One or the other must die. ”... The South now demands room and right for extension. She asks the North to be a partner. For every free State she demands one State for slavery. One dark orb must be swung into its orbit, to groan and travail in pain, for every new orb of liberty over which the morning stars shall sing for joy. “... It is time for good men and true to gird up their loins and stand forth for God and humanity. No compromises can help us which dodge the question, certainly none which settle it for slavery.... “There never was a plainer question for the North. It is her duty openly, firmly, and for ever to refuse to slavery another inch of territory, and to see to it that it never gets it by fraud. It is her duty to refuse her hand or countenance to slavery where it now exists. It is her duty to declare that she will under no consideration be a party to any farther inhumanity and injustice.... “Mr. Clay’s Compromise resolutions demand better provision for the recovery of fugitive slaves, and a bill is now pending in the United States Senate for that purpose. On this matter our feelings are so strong that we confess a liability to intemperance of expression. “If the compromises of the Constitution include requisitions which violate humanity, I will not be bound by them. Not even the Constitution shall make me unjust. If my patriotic sires confederated in my behalf that I should maintain that instrument, so I will to the utmost bound of right. But who, with power which even God denies to Himself, shall by compact fore-ordain me to the commission of inhumanity and injustice? I disown the act. I repudiate the obligation. Never while I have breath will I help any official miscreant in his base errand of recapturing a fellow-man for bondage; and may my foot palsy and my right hand forget her cunning if I ever become so untrue to mercy and to religion as not by all the means in my power to give aid and succor to every man whose courageous flight tells me he is worthy of liberty! ”... From those compromises, like Mr. Clay’s, which seek for peace rather than for humanity—from such compromises, guileless though they seem, and gilded till they shine like heaven, evermore may we be delivered.”