Now, if the King of Great Britain prostituted his negative that slavery might not be restricted, what, in after times, shall be said of those who prostitute their affirmative that it may be extended? Yet it is now proposed, in some of the state legislatures, and in this Capitol, to do precisely the same thing, in regard to the Territory of Oregon, which was done by Great Britain to her transatlantic possessions; not merely to legalize slavery there, but to prohibit its inhabitants from prohibiting _it_. Though three thousand miles west of Great Britain, she had certain constitutional rights over us, and could affect our destiny. Though the inhabitants of Oregon are three thousand miles west of us, yet we have certain constitutional rights over them, and can affect their destiny. Great Britain annulled our laws for prohibiting slavery; we propose to annul an existing law of Oregon prohibiting slavery. If the execrations of mankind are yet too feeble and too few to punish Great Britain for her wickedness, what scope, what fulness, what eternity of execration and anathema will be a sufficient retribution upon us, if we volunteer to copy her example? It was in the eighteenth century when the mother country thus made merchandise of human beings,--a time when liberty was a forbidden word in the languages of Europe. It is in the nineteenth century that we propose to reënact, and on an ampler scale, the same execrable villany,--a time when liberty is the rallying cry of all Christendom. So great has been the progress of liberal ideas within the last century, that what was venial at its beginning is unpardonable at its close. To drive coffles of slaves from here to Oregon, in the middle of the nineteenth century, is more infamous than it was to bring cargoes of slaves from Africa here, in the middle of the eighteenth. Yet such is the period that men would select to perpetuate and increase the horrors of this traffic.