With every philanthropic northern man, a collateral motive for keeping the new territories free is, that they may be a land of hope and of promise to the poor man, to whichever of all our states he may belong; where he may go and find a home and a homestead and abundance. But the south, in attempting to open these territories to the slaveholders, would give them to the rich alone,--would give them to less than three hundred thousand persons out of a population of six millions. The interests of the poorer classes at the south all demand free territory, where they can go and rise at once to an equality with their fellow-citizens, which they never can do at home. They are natural abolitionists, and unless blinded by ignorance, or overawed by their social superiors, they will so declare themselves. Every intelligent and virtue-loving wife or mother, at the south, when she thinks of her husband and her sons, is forced to be an abolitionist. The attempt, therefore, to subject the new territories to the law of slavery is not made in the name of one half of the people of the United States; it is not made for the six millions, more or less, who inhabit the slave states; but it is made for less than three hundred thousand slaveholders among more than twenty millions of people. There is one other “hazard,” sir, which the south invokes and defies, which to her high-minded and honor-loving sons, should be more formidable than all the rest. She is defying the Spirit of the Age. She is not only defying the judgment of contemporaries, but invoking upon herself the execrations of posterity. Mark the progress in the public sentiment of Christendom, within the last few centuries, on the subject of slavery and the rights of man. After the discovery of this continent by Columbus, the ecclesiastics of Spain held councils to discuss the question, whether the aborigines of this country had or had not souls to be saved. They left this question undecided; but they said, as it was possible that the nations of the new world might have an immortal spirit, they would send them the gospel, so as to be on the safe side; and the mission of Las Casas was the result. In the time of Lord Coke, only a little more than two centuries ago, the doctrine was openly avowed and held, in Westminster Hall, that the heathen had no rights; and therefore that it was lawful for Christians to drive them out of their inheritance, and to despoil them, as the Jews despoiled the Egyptians and drove out the Canaanites. During the seventeenth century, all the commercial nations of Europe engaged in the African slave trade, without compunction or reproach. In the last, or eighteenth century, the horrors of that trade were aggravated and blackened by such demoniacal atrocities, as, were it not for some redeeming attributes among men, would have made the human race immortally hateful. Even when our own constitution was formed, in 1787,