"'My position on the question of slavery is this; and, so far from wishing to conceal it, I desire it should be known to all. Muzzles were made for dogs, and not for men; and no press and no party can put a muzzle on my mouth, so long as I value my freedom. I make bold, then, to proclaim that I am no slavery propagandist. I will resort to all proper remedies to protect and defend slavery where it exists, but I will neither assist in nor encourage any attempt to force it upon a reluctant people anywhere, and still less will I justify the use of the military power of the country to establish it in any of the territories. If it finds its way there by legitimate means, it is all well; but never by force, through any instrumentality of mine. I am myself a slaveholder, and all the property my children have in the world is slave property, inherited from their mother; and he who undertakes to connect my name, or my opinions, with abolitionism, is either a knave or a fool, and not unfrequently both. And this is the only answer I have to make to them. I have not connected myself with any sectional party or sectional question; and so help me God, I never will.'" JAMES H. HAMMOND. The moderate political views which Gov. Hammond, of South Carolina, has within a couple of years given publicity to, has given him a somewhat national reputation among the adherents of the Democratic party. He came to Congress as a politician of the Southern Rights school, and it was generally supposed that he would be found acting with the ultra wing of the Southern party in Congress. He brought with him the reputation of a scholar and an orator, and mingled at once in the Lecompton fray. He took sides with the administration against Mr. Douglas, though it was noticed at the time that the senator had very little to say about the Lecompton Constitution and the real issue then before Congress. His speeches were upon the general question of slavery. The new senator from South Carolina attracted the universal attention of Congress and the strangers then present in Washington, and the impression he made was generally a happy one. His manners were quiet, unostentatious, gentlemanly. His style of speech was smooth, pleasant, and sometimes eloquent. As a man he was liked. Genial in his nature and pleasant in his conversation, he soon made warm friends at the capital--even among some of the very men whom he had in his South Carolina home regarded as little less than monsters in human shape. Senator Hammond at first tried his lance with the Illinois Giant, but either from personal considerations, or other, he soon desisted. To show Gov. Hammond's position on the slavery question in the winter of 1847-8, we quote a few passages from his celebrated speech delivered in the Senate in the Lecompton debate. We have, in the following passage, his opinion of squatter sovereignty: