“That the rapid population of the State of Ohio sufficiently evinces, in the opinion of your Committee, that the labor of slaves is not necessary to promote the growth and settlement of colonies in that region. That this labor, demonstrably the dearest of any, can only be employed to advantage in the cultivation of products more valuable than any known to that quarter of the United States. That the Committee deem it _highly dangerous and inexpedient to impair a provision wisely calculated to promote the happiness and prosperity of the Northwestern country_, and to give strength and security to that extensive frontier. _In the salutary operation of this sagacious and benevolent restraint_ it is believed that the inhabitants of Indiana will at no very distant day find ample remuneration for a temporary privation of labor and of emigration.”[33] With these benignant and most suggestive words of an eminent Slave-Master Congress happily concurred, and the Prohibition was confirmed. Had the modern pretension of Popular Sovereignty then prevailed, the States of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, instead of becoming the smiling home of Free Labor, would be suffering from the blight of Slavery,--instead of joining in triumphant vote for Lincoln, they would, like their neighbor, Missouri, be linked with the Slave States in support of Breckinridge, or Bell, or Douglas, and would constitute part of that Slave Power under whose tyranny the country has so long suffered. The advantage of the Prohibition is as clear as its necessity. I do not dwell on the comparison between Free States and Slave States, between free labor and slave labor, between the social system fostered by Freedom and the social system engendered by Slavery, between the civilization of the one and the barbarism of the other; but I call attention simply to two States, covering nearly the same spaces of latitude, resembling each other in soil, climate, and natural productions, lying side by side, and organized at about the same time,--Illinois, thanks to the Prohibition, a Free State, and Missouri cursed with more than one hundred thousand slaves. Look at the statistics of these two States, if you would know the contrast which day by day magnifies the Prohibition. And yet, in the face of all this experience, showing, first, the necessity of Prohibition as a safeguard to the Territories, and, secondly, its immeasurable advantages, you are now called to abandon the early policy of the Republic, to turn your back upon this policy as irrational and unwise, and to adopt a new pretension, with a plausible name, which, in the only instance where it has been tried, produced discord, strife, and blood. You are called to give up the old Aladdin’s Lamp of magical power, filling the land with infinite treasures and the true nobility of Freedom, and to take in exchange a new patent article now hawked about the streets of Worcester.