or the most aristocratic of republics, was ever invested with such an odious and unjust privilege as that of the separate and exclusive representation of less than half a million owners of slaves, in the Hall of this House, in the Chair of the Senate, and in the Presidential mansion?'--'This investment of power in the owners of one species of property concentrated in the highest authorities of the nation, and disseminated through thirteen of the twenty-six States of the Union, constitutes a privileged order of men in the community, more adverse to the rights of all, and more pernicious to the interests of the whole, than any order of nobility ever known. To call government thus constituted a democracy, is to insult the understanding of mankind. To call it an aristocracy, is to do injustice to that form of government. Aristocracy is the government of _the best_. Its standard qualification for accession to power _is merit_, ascertained by popular election recurring at short intervals of time. If even that government is prone to degenerate into tyranny, what must be the character of that form of polity in which the standard qualification for access to power is wealth in the possession of slaves? It is doubly tainted with the infection of riches and of slavery. _There is no name in the language of national jurisprudence that can define it_--no model in the records of ancient history, or in the political theories of Aristotle, with which it can be likened. It was introduced into the Constitution of the United States by an equivocation--a representation of property under the name of persons. Little did the members of the Convention from the free States foresee what a sacrifice to Moloch was hidden under the mask of this concession.'--'The House of Representatives of the United States consists of 223 members--all, by the _letter_ of the Constitution, representatives only of _persons_, as 135 of them really are; but the other 88, equally representing the _persons_ of their constituents, by whom they are elected, also represent, under the name of _other persons_, upwards of two and a half millions of _slaves_, held as the _property_ of less than half a million of the white constituents, and valued at twelve hundred millions of dollars. Each of these 88 members represents in fact the whole of that mass of associated wealth, and the persons and exclusive interests of its owners; all thus knit together, like the members of a moneyed corporation, with a capital not of thirty-five or forty or fifty, but of twelve hundred millions of dollars, exhibiting the most extraordinary exemplification of the anti-republican tendencies of associated wealth that the world ever saw,'--'Here is one class of men, consisting of not more than one fortieth part of the whole people, not more than one-thirtieth part of the free population, exclusively devoted to their personal interests identified with their own as slaveholders of the same associated wealth, and