[1] Mr. Nicholas, in a speech in the Kentucky Legislature in 1837, objected to calling a convention to alter the Constitution, because in such a convention he believed the abolition of slavery would be agitated; and he reminded the house, that in the State "the slaveholders do not stand in the ratio of more than one to six or seven." Of course slavery is maintained in Kentucky, through the consent of the non-slaveholders. There is not a State or Territory in the Union in which you, fellow-citizens, have not an overwhelming majority over the slaveholders; and the majority is probably the greatest in those in which the slaves are the most numerous, because in such they are chiefly concentrated on large plantations. It has been the policy of the slaveholders to keep entirely out of sight their own numerical inferiority, and to speak and act as if _their_ interests were those of the whole community. They are the nobility of the south, and they find it expedient to forget that there are any commoners. Hence with them slavery is the INSTITUTION of the SOUTH, while it is in fact the institution of only a portion of the people of the south. It is their craft to magnify and extol the importance and advantages of _their_ institution; and hence we are told by Gov. McDuffie, that slavery "is the CORNER STONE of our republican institutions." To defend this corner stone from the assaults of truth and reason, he audaciously proposed to the legislature, that abolitionists should be punished "with death without benefit of clergy." This gentleman, like most demagogues, while professing great zeal for the PEOPLE, whose interests were for the most part adverse to slavery, was in fact looking to his own aggrandizement. He was, at the very time he uttered these absurd and murderous sentiments, a great planter, and his large "force" was said to have raised in 1836, no less than 122,500 lbs. of cotton.[2] In the same spirit, and with the same design, the Report of a Committee of the South Carolina Legislature, made in 1842, speaks of slavery "as an ancient domestic institution, _cherished in the hearts of the people at the south_, the eradication of which would demolish our whole system of policy, domestic, social, and political." [2] See the newspapers of the day.