At present the work is plain before us. It is simply to elect our candidates: Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, whose ability, so conspicuously shown in his own State, attracted at once the admiration of the whole country, whose character no breath has touched, and whose heart is large enough to embrace the broad Republic and all its people,--him you will elect President; and Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine, whose clear head, firm principles, and ample experience none who sit with him in the Senate Chamber can contest,--him you will elect Vice-President. Electing these, we shall put the National Government, at least in its Executive department, openly and actively on the side of Freedom; and this alone will be of incalculable influence, not only in itself, but as harbinger of the Future. First and foremost, we shall save the Territories from the five-headed Barbarism of Slavery, keeping them in their normal condition, as they came from the hand of God, free,--with Freedom written on the soil and engraved on the rock, while the winds whisper it in the trees, the rivers murmur it in their flow, and all Nature echoes it in joy unspeakable. Next, we shall save the country and the age from that crying infamy, the Slave-Trade, whose opening anew, as now menaced, is but a logical consequence of the new theories of Slavery. If Slavery be the “blessing” it is vaunted, then must the Slave-Trade be beneficent, while they who ply it with fiercest activity take place among the missionaries and saints of humanity. Next, we shall save the Constitution, at least within the sphere of Executive influence, from outrage and perversion; so that the President will no longer lend himself to that wildest pretension of the Slave Oligarchy, as Mr. Buchanan has done, declaring that Slavery is carried under the Constitution into all the Territories, and that it now exists in Kansas as firmly as in South Carolina. As out of nothing can come nothing, so out of the nothing in the Constitution on this subject can be derived no support for this inordinate pretension, which may be best dismissed in that classical similitude by which the ancients rebuked a groundless folly, when they called it _ass’s wool_, or something that does not exist, and plainly said to its author, _Asini lanas quæris_,--“You are in quest of ass’s wool!”[163]