Now, let me place the subject before you in another point of view. The people of the Southern States can never abandon this great principle of State equality in the Union without self-degradation. [“Never!”] Never without an acknowledgment that they are inferior in this respect to their sister States. Whilst it is vital to them to preserve their equality, the Northern States surrender nothing by admitting this principle. In doing this they only yield obedience to the Constitution of their country as expounded by the Supreme Court of the United States. While for the North it is comparatively a mere abstraction, with the South it is a question of co-equal State sovereignty in the Union. If the decrees of the high tribunal established by the Constitution for the very purposes are to be set at naught and disregarded, it will tend to render all property of every description insecure. What, then, have the North to do? Merely to say that, as good citizens, they will yield obedience to the decision of the Supreme Court, and admit the right of a Southern man to take his property into the Territories, and hold it there just as a Northern man may do; and it is to me the most extraordinary thing in the world that this country should now be distracted and divided because certain persons at the North will not agree that their brethren at the South shall have the same rights in the Territories which they enjoy. What would I, as a Pennsylvanian, say or do, supposing anybody was to contend that the legislature of any Territory could outlaw iron or coal within the Territory? [Laughter and cheers.] The principle is precisely the same. The Supreme Court of the United States have decided,—what was known to us all to have been the existing state of affairs for fifty years,—that slaves are property. Admit that fact, and you admit everything. Then that property in the Territories must be protected precisely in the same manner with any other property. If it be not so protected in the Territories, the holders of it are degraded before the world.