Now, this is drawing moral conclusions from physical premises. It is arguing from physics to metaphysics. It is determining the law of the spirit by geographical phenomena. It is undertaking to settle by mountains and rivers, and not by the Ten Commandments, a great question of human duty. It abandons the second commandment of Christ and all bills of rights enacted in conformity thereto, and leaves our obligations to our “neighbor” to be determined by the accidents of earth and water and air. To ascertain whether a people will obey the Divine command, and do to others as they would be done by, it looks at the thermometer. What a problem would this be: “Required the height above the level of the sea at which the oppressor ‘will undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke,’--to be determined barometrically.” Alas! this cannot be done. Slavery depends, not upon climate, but upon conscience. Wherever the wicked passions of the human heart can go, there slavery can go. Slavery is an effect. Avarice, sloth, pride, and the love of domination, are its cause. In ascending mountain sides, at what altitude do men leave these passions behind them? Different vegetable growths are to be found at different heights, depending also upon the zone. This I can understand. There is the altitude of the palm, the altitude of the oak, the altitude of the pine, and, far above them all, the line of perpetual snow. But, in regard to innocence and guilt, where is the _white line_? How high up can a slaveholder go and not lose his free agency? At what elevation will the whip fall from the hand of the master, and the fetter from the limbs of the slave? There is no such point. Freedom and slavery on the one hand, and climate and geology on the other, are incommensurable quantities. We might as well attempt to determine a question in theology by the cube root, or a question in ethics by the black art. Slavery, being a crime founded upon human passions, can go wherever those passions are unrestrained. It has existed in Asia from the earliest ages, notwithstanding its “formation and scenery.” It labors and groans on the flanks of the Ural mountains now. There are to-day forty-eight millions of slaves in Russia, not one rood of which comes down so low as the northern boundary of California and New Mexico. Had Mr. Webster’s philosophy been correct, then California was at superfluous pains when she incorporated the ordinance of 1787 into her constitution. Instead of saying that “slavery and involuntary servitude, (except for crime,) shall be forever prohibited,” she should have said, “Whereas, by a law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth,” “slavery cannot exist in California,” therefore we will not “reaffirm an ordinance of nature, nor reenact the will of God.”