But he accepts my explanation, and then appeals from me to what he is pleased to call, (and I thank him for the justice that prompted the well-deserved compliment,) my “intelligent, patriotic, and humane constituents,”--“with entire confidence that it will not meet their approval.” I gladly join in this appeal. As “_intelligent_” men, my constituents foresee that the extension of slavery over our territories will not only be an unspeakable crime in itself, but will be converted into the means of future unspeakable crimes in further extensions. As “_patriotic_” men, they prefer to bear any calamity that may come upon themselves, rather than to devolve accumulated calamities, growing out of their own dereliction from duty, upon their posterity. As “_humane_” men, they would deprecate and forefend that greatest of inhumanities, the dooming of increased thousands and millions of their fellow-men to the dreadful inheritance of bondage. And as religious men,--as men who “tremble when they reflect that God is just, and that his justice will not sleep forever,”--they mean to use all constitutional means to arrest the slave-creating and slave-extending policy of this government, let the two or three hundred thousand slaveholders among our twenty millions of people do what they will. That the bearings of the subject may be rightly understood, it should be remembered that my speech was made on the 15th of February, after ten weeks of threatened disunion on certain specified and not improbable contingencies. “My conclusion,” therefore, was not _aggressive_, but _submissive_. I only declared which branch of their proffered alternative I should prefer. The closing paragraph of the respected senator’s communication alludes to the _motives_ of those wide and painful differences which are made between the whites and the slaves in the _criminal_ legislation of the Southern States. Nothing could be more edifying, as to the demoralizing nature of slavery and its effects upon men, who, like the senator, are otherwise honorable and generous, than a comparison of the two codes of law and the two systems of jurisprudence which the rulers have respectively established for themselves and for their bondmen. The laws or customs known to civilized men and to barbarians are not more diverse. It would be rash and reckless in me to encounter the distinguished senator on any other subject; but on this I would say, as was said by a knight in an old tournament, that he had such confidence in the justness of his cause that he would give his adversary the advantage of sun and wind. HORACE MANN. WASHINGTON, April 1, 1850. LETTERS ON THE EXTENSION OF SLAVERY INTO CALIFORNIA AND NEW MEXICO; AND ON THE DUTY OF CONGRESS TO PROVIDE THE TRIAL BY JURY FOR ALLEGED FUGITIVE SLAVES. HON. HORACE MANN;