By the proposed measure, we not only become parties to the acquisition of a large population of slaves, with all the crime of slavery, but we open a new market for the slaves of Virginia and the Carolinas, and _legalize a new slave-trade_. A new slave-trade! Consider this well. You cannot forget the horrors of that too famous "middle passage," where crowds of human beings, stolen, and borne by sea far from their warm African homes, are pressed on shipboard into spaces of smaller dimensions for each than a coffin. And yet the deadly consequences of this middle passage are believed to fall short of those sometimes undergone by the wretched coffles driven from the exhausted lands of the Northern Slave States to the sugar plantations nearer the sun of the South. One quarter part are said often to perish in these removals. I see them, in imagination, on their fatal journey, chained in bands, and driven like cattle, leaving behind what has become to them a home and a country, (alas! what a home, and what a country!)--husband torn from wife, and parent from child, to be sold anew into more direful captivity. Can this take place with our consent, nay, without our most determined opposition? If the slave-trade is to receive new adoption from our country, let us have no part or lot in it. Let us wash our hands of this great guilt. As we read its horrors, may each of us be able to exclaim, with conscience void of offence, "Thou canst not say I did it." God forbid that the votes and voices of Northern freemen should help to bind anew the fetters of the slave! God forbid that the lash of the slave-dealer should descend by any sanction from New England! God forbid that the blood which spurts from the lacerated, quivering flesh of the slave should soil the hem of the white garments of Massachusetts! Voices of discouragement reach us from other parts of the country, and even from our own friends in this bracing air. We are told that all exertion will be vain, and that the admission of a new Slave State is "a foregone conclusion." But this is no reason why we should shrink from duty. "I will try," was the response of an American officer on the field of battle. "England expects every man to do his duty," was the signal of the British admiral. Ours is a contest holier than those which aroused these stirring words. Let _us_ try. Let every man among _us_ do his duty.