Let our servants remember we forgive all things to devotion to our common humanity; we pardon any policy, that finally keeps us in the current of the nineteenth century; but we forgive no man who, through fear, or flattery, or ignorance, or any motive, puts in peril the cause of human rights. For such there is everlasting political punishment. Our rulers must not open the African slave trade; or make our northern cities the depots of the infamous traffic in men; or permit further acquisition of territory for slavery; or change the Republic into a machine to assist and protect property in man wherever our flag is planted. The national policy must aim at a final limitation of slavery in the nation, and a transferal of the whole controversy to the slave states. Whoever can best accomplish this shall be approved. Only by this zealous upholding of freedom in eighteen states can the North educate herself to her secondary obligation to preserve the Union by defending the people of the South against the slave power. Whatever may be the capacity of liberty in the free states to sustain a disruption of the Union; it is morally certain that the only rational hope of liberty in fifteen southern states is in their continuance of the partnership in a national government administered in the interests of human rights. Were these fifteen states to-day severed from our connection and united in a slave empire, they would be ever haunted by three specters, either more formidable than any present danger. Their intestine conflicts would compare with our present agitation like the spouting of a volcano to the sputtering of a coal fire. A thousand ambitious and unscrupulous characters stand waiting that event to run the wild race for power whose goal is anarchy. There could be no permanent union between South Carolina and Maryland; Mississippi and Kentucky; for revolutions do not go backward, and the forces that would sweep fifteen states out of the Union would fatally drift any new government they should create towards a military despotism. They would be in constant danger from servile insurrection; and the rapid increase of slave population would necessitate a reign of terror through all their borders. They would perpetually be urged into wars with every civilized power; for nobody supposes the nations of the world will permit a black empire to open the slave trade and steal unlimited territory. On whatever side we look, the only hope of free institutions in the south is adherence to a Union working towards the freedom of man.