Well, a law was passed last September, that would have been atrocious two hundred years ago: you all know it. I have no words to describe it by. For the last two hundred years, the English race has not invented an adjective adequate to describe it. The English language is used up and broken down by any attempt to describe it. That law was not the desire of the people; and, could the nation have been polled North and South, three fourths would have said "No!" to the passage of that law. It was not passed to obtain the value of the slaves escaped, for in seven months twenty slaves have not been returned! It was not a measure looking to legal results, but it was a political measure, looking to political results: what those results will be we shall see in due time. * * * * * In America the controlling class is divided into two great parties: one is the Slave Power in the States of the South; the other is the Money Power in the cities of the North. There are exceptional men in both divisions--men that own slaves, and yet love freedom and hate slavery. There are rich men in Northern cities who do the same; all honor to them. But in general it is not so; nay, it is quite otherwise. They are hostile to the great idea of America. Let me speak with the nicety of theological speech. These two divisions are two "Persons" in one "Power;" there is only one "Nature" in both, one "Will." If not the same nature, it is a like nature: Homoi-ousia, if not Homo-ousia! The Fugitive Slave Law was the act of the two "Persons," representing the same "Nature," and the same "Will." It was the result of a union of the Slave Power of the South with the Money Power of the North: the Philistines and the Hebrews ploughed with the same heifer. There is sometimes an excuse or a palliation for a wicked deed. There was something like one for the "Gag Law," the "Alien and Sedition Law," although there is no valid excuse for either of these laws, none to screen their author from deserved reproach. There is no excuse for the Fugitive Slave Law; there was no occasion for it.