“In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government _cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free_. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,--I do not expect the house to fall,--_but I do expect it will cease to be divided_. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery _will arrest the further spread of it_, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief _that it is in the course of ultimate extinction_, or its advocates _will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States_,--old as well as new, North as well as South.” [_“Good,” “Good,” and cheers._] I am delighted to hear you Black Republicans say, “Good.” I have no doubt that doctrine expresses your sentiments; and I will prove to you now, if you will listen to me, that it is revolutionary and destructive of the existence of this government. Mr. Lincoln, in the extract from which I have read, says that this government cannot endure permanently in the same condition in which it was made by its framers--divided into free and slave States. He says that it has existed for about seventy years thus divided, and yet he tells you that it cannot endure permanently on the same principles and in the same relative condition in which our fathers made it. Why can it not exist divided into free and slave States? Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and the great men of that day made this government divided into free States and slave States, and left each State perfectly free to do as it pleased on the subject of slavery. Why can it not exist on the same principles on which our fathers made it? They knew when they framed the Constitution that in a country as wide and broad as this, with such a variety of climate, production, and interest, the people necessarily required different laws and institutions in different localities. They knew that the laws and regulations which would suit the granite hills of New Hampshire would be unsuited to the rice plantations of South Carolina; and they therefore provided that each State should retain its own legislature and its own sovereignty, with the full and complete power to do as it pleased within its own limits, in all that was local and not national. One of the reserved rights of the States was the right to regulate the relations between master and servant, on the slavery question. At the time the Constitution was framed there were thirteen States in the Union, twelve of which were slaveholding States and one a free State. Suppose this doctrine of uniformity preached by Mr. Lincoln, that the States should all be free or all be slave, had prevailed; and what would have been the result? Of course, the twelve slaveholding States would have overruled the one free State; and slavery would have been fastened by