I understand those Southern men, who talk so much about Southern rights, claim not only the right to take slaves into the Territories, but they claim the right to take slave laws and the habits and customs which are practiced in the slave States. They claim to take laws by which four million negroes are reduced to the condition of brutes. Six million white men, women, and children, who have to obtain their living by labor, are condemned to perpetual degradation and ignorance, by which three hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders can govern and control the destinies of the millions of people in the slave States; and not only of those people, but of this great country of ours. They not only claim the right to take their negroes into the Territories, but they claim to take laws there that will deny to every man the freedom of speech and the liberty of the press. They claim the right to seal every man's lips, and stop every man's mouth, on questions of great national interest. They claim to take with them the right to condemn as a felon the man who may utter and maintain the Declaration of Independence, or the opinions of the conscript fathers of the Republic. They claim to take with them the right to condemn as a felon the man who dares proclaim the precepts of our holy religion. They claim to take with them the right to strip naked and cut into gashes the back of the man who utters opinions that do not exactly "square and corner" with the interests of the aristocratic slaveholders. A negro population is one by no means desirable, but a free white man could live where there are negroes, and maintain his freedom; but no white non-slaveholder can live where slave laws, customs, and habits, pertain, and retain the rights that belong to free men in free States. A man may live in the swamps of the torrid zone, and escape the crocodiles, alligators, and other slimy and creeping things, but he cannot escape the miasma and poison of the atmosphere. If the slaveholder is permitted to go into the Territories, and take his slave laws, habits, and customs, the people of the free States are to a great extent excluded therefrom, and deprived of all rights therein. But slaveholders say they will go; they will take their slaves, and their slave code; they will establish there such a despotism as reigns in some of the slave States; they will poison the air that surrounds the fertile plains of the West, until freedom shall sicken and die; and we are constantly told, that if we do not yield to their unreasonable demands, this Union shall be dissolved.