“Our policy for the future is plain. All the natural laws of God are warring upon slavery. We have only to let the process go on. Let slavery alone. Let it go to seed. Hold it to its own natural fruit. Cause it to abide by itself. Cut off every branch that hangs beyond the wall, every root that spreads. Shut it up to itself and let it alone. We do not ask to interfere with the internal policy of a single State by Congressional enactments: we will not ask to take one guarantee from the institution. We only ask that a line be drawn about it; that an insuperable bank be cast up; that it be fixed and for ever settled that slavery must find no new sources, new fields, new prerogatives, but that it must abide in its place, subject to all the legitimate changes which will be brought upon it by the spirit of a nation essentially democratic, by schools taught by enlightened men, by colleges sending annually into every profession thousands bred to justice and hating its reverse, by churches preaching a gospel that has always heralded civil liberty, by manufactories which always thrive best when the masses are free and refined and therefore have their wants multiplied, by free agriculture and free commerce. “When slavery begins, under such a treatment, to flag, we demand that she be denied political favoritism to regain her loss; we demand that no laws be enacted to give health to her paralysis and strength to her relaxing grasp. She boldly and honestly demanded a right to equality with the North, and prophetically spoke by Calhoun, that the North would preponderate and crush her. It is true. Time is her enemy. Liberty will, if let alone, always be a match for oppression. Now, it is because statesmen propose stepping in between slavery and the appointed bourne to which she goes, scourged by God and nature, that we resent these statesmen and refuse to follow them. If her wounds can be stanched, if she may have adventitious aid in new privileges, slavery will renew her strength and stave off the final day. But if it be forbidden one additional favor and be obliged to stand up by the side of free labor, free schools, free churches, free institutions; if it be obliged to live in a land of free books, free papers, and free Bibles, it will either die or else it _ought_ to live.” He ridicules those measures that had been adopted North and South to enforce the peace, and compares those who keep agitating against agitation to poor old “crazy Dinah” who used to sit on the pulpit stairs in Litchfield. “Once she began talking, but, startled at her want of manners, she said out loud: ‘Why I’m talking! I’m talking in meetin’! There, I spoke again. I ought not to speak. There, I spoke once more. Tut, tut! why, I _keep_ a-speaking.’”