But suppose a doubt could be reasonably entertained about the invasion of the new territories by slavery. Even suppose the chances to preponderate against it. What then? Are we to submit a question of human liberty over vast regions and for an indefinite extent of time, to the determination of chance? With all my faculties I say, _No!_ Let me ask any man, let me respectfully ask Mr. Webster himself, if it were his own father and mother, and brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters, who were in peril of such a fate, whether he would abandon them to chance,--even to a favorable chance. Would he suffer their fate to be determined by dice or divination, when positive prohibition was in his power? And by what rule of Christian morality, or even of enlightened heathen morality, can we deal differently with the kindred of others from what we would with our own? He is not a Christian whose humanity is bounded by the legal degrees of blood, or by general types of feature. But Mr. Webster would not “taunt” the south. Neither would I. I would not taunt any honorable man, much less a criminal. Still, when the most precious interests of humanity are in peril, I would not be timid. I would not stop too long to cull lovers’ phrases. Standing under the eye of God, in the forum of the world and before the august tribunal of posterity, when the litigants are freedom and tyranny, and human happiness and human misery the prize they contest, it should happen to the sworn advocate of liberty, as Quintilian says it did to Demosthenes, “not to speak and to plead, but to thunder and to lighten.” Mr. Webster would not taunt the south; and yet I say the south were never so insulted before as he has insulted them. Common scoffs, jeers, vilifications, are flattery and sycophancy compared with the indignities he heaped upon them. Look at the facts. The south waged war with Mexico from one, and only one, motive; for one, and only one, object,--the extension of slavery. They refused peace unless it surrendered territory. That territory must be south of the abhorred line of 36° 30´. The same President who abandoned the broad belt of country on our northern frontier, from 49° to 54° 40´, to which we had, in his own words, “an unquestionable title,” would allow no prohibition of slavery to be imposed upon the territory which Mexico ceded, though she would bury it a foot deep in gold. The Proviso had been resisted in all forms, from the beginning. Southern Whigs voted against the ratification of the treaty, foreseeing the struggle that was to follow. Desperate efforts had been made, at the close of the last session of Congress, to smuggle in an unrestricted territorial government, against all parliamentary rule and all constitutional implication. The whole south, as one man, claimed it as a “describable, weighable, estimable, tangible,” and most valuable “right” to carry slaves there. Calhoun, Berrien, Badger, Mason, Davis,--the whole southern phalanx, Whig and