shall determine this question, and not the abolitionists of the north. That is the spirit of our freemen." Here is the grand conclusion: "This man, Brown, and his accomplices, had sympathizers. Who were they? One who was, according to his public speeches, his defender and laudator, is governor of Massachusetts. Other officials of that State applauded Brown's heroism, magnified his courage, and no doubt lamented his ill success. Throughout the whole north, public meetings, immense gatherings, triumphal processions, the honors of the hero and conqueror, were awarded to this incendiary and assassin. They did not condemn the traitor; think you they abhorred the treason? Yet ... when a distinguished senator from a non-slaveholding State proposed to punish such attempts at invasion and insurrection, Lincoln and his party say before the world, 'Here is a sedition law.' To carry out the constitution, to protect States from invasion and suppress insurrection therein, to comply with the laws of the United States is a 'sedition law,' and the chief of this party treats it with contempt; yet, under the very same clause of the constitution which warranted this bill, you derive your power to punish offences against the law of nations. Under this warrant you have tried and punished our citizens for meditating the invasion of foreign States; you have stopped illegal expeditions; you have denounced our citizens engaged therein as pirates and commended them to the bloody vengeance of a merciless enemy. Under this principle alone you protect our weaker neighbors of Cuba, Honduras, and Nicaragua. By this alone are we empowered and bound to prevent our people from conspiring together, giving aid, money, or arms to fit out expeditions against a foreign nation. Foreign nations get the benefit of this protection; but we are worse off in the union than if we were out of it. Out of it we should have the protection of the neutrality laws. Now you can come among us; raids may be made; you may put the incendiary torch to our dwellings, as you did last summer for hundreds of miles on the frontier of Texas; you may do what John Brown did, and when the miscreants escape to your States you will not punish them, you will not deliver them up. Therefore, we stand defenceless. We must cut loose from the accursed 'body of this death,' even to get the benefit of the law of nations.