But it seems that, although the proposed restrictions may not be justified by the clause of the Constitution which gives power to admit new States into the Union, separately considered, there are other parts of the Constitution which, combined with that clause, will warrant it. And first, we are informed that there is a clause in this instrument which declares that Congress shall guarantee to every State a republican form of government; that slavery and such a form of government are incompatible; and, finally, as a conclusion from these premises, that Congress not only have a right, but are bound to exclude slavery from a new State. Here again, sir, there is an edifying inconsistency between the argument and the measure which it professes to vindicate. By the argument it is maintained that Missouri cannot have a republican form of government, and at the same time tolerate negro slavery. By the measure it is admitted that Missouri may tolerate slavery, as to persons already in bondage there, and be nevertheless fit to be received into the Union. What sort of constitutional mandate is this which can thus be made to bend and truckle and compromise as if it were a simple rule of expediency that might admit of exceptions upon motives of countervailing expediency. There can be no such pliancy in the peremptory provisions of the Constitution. They cannot be obeyed by moieties and violated in the same ratio. They must be followed out to their full extent, or treated with that decent neglect which has at least the merit of forbearing to render contumacy obtrusive by an ostentatious display of the very duty which we in part abandon. If the decalogue could be observed in this casuistical manner, we might be grievous sinners, and yet be liable to no reproach. We might persist in all our habitual irregularities, and still be spotless. We might, for example, continue to covet our neighbors' goods, provided they were the same neighbors whose goods we had before coveted--and so of all the other commandments. Will the gentlemen tell us that it is the quantity of slaves, not the quality of slavery, which takes from a government the republican form? Will they tell us (for they have not yet told us) that there are constitutional grounds (to say nothing of common sense) upon which the slavery which now exists in Missouri may be reconciled with a republican form of government, while any addition to the number of its slaves (the quality of slavery remaining the same) from the other States, will be repugnant to that form, and metamorphose it into some nondescript government disowned by the Constitution? They cannot have recourse to the treaty of 1803 for such a distinction, since independently of what I have before observed on that head, the gentlemen have contended that the treaty has nothing to do with the matter.