In the spring of 1860, there was a debate on this subject in the Legislature of New York. In the course of it, Mr. Smith, of Chatauqua, said:--"How _came_ slavery in this country? It came here without law; in violation of all law. It came here by force and violence; by the force of might over right; and it remains here to-day by no better title. And now we are called upon, by the ruling power at Washington, not merely to tolerate it, but to legalize it all over the United States! By the Fugitive Slave Bill, we are forbidden to shelter or assist the forlornest stranger who ever appealed for sympathy or aid. We are required by absolute law to shut out every feeling of compassion for suffering humanity. Fines and imprisonment impend over us, for exercising one of the holiest charities of our religion. Virtue and humanity are legislated into crime. Let us meet the issue like men! Let us assert our utter abhorrence of all human laws, that compel us to violate the common law of humanity and justice; and by so acting assert the broad principles of the Declaration of American Independence, and the letter and spirit of the Constitution. If the North was as devoted to the cause of Freedom as the South is to Slavery, our national troubles would vanish like darkness before the sun. Our country would then become what it _should_ be,--free, happy, prosperous, and respected by all the world. Then we could say, truthfully, that she is the home of the free, the land of the brave, the asylum of the oppressed." In the same debate, Mr. Maxson, of Allegheny, said:--"All laws, whether Constitutions or statutes, that invade human rights, are null. A community has no more power to strike down the rights of man by Constitutions, than by any other means. Do those who give us awfully solemn lessons about the inviolability of compacts, mean that one man is bound to rob another because he has _agreed_ to? In this age of schools, of churches and of Bibles, do they mean to teach us that an agreement to rob men of their rights, in whatever solemn form that agreement may be written out, is binding? Has the morality of the nineteenth century culminated in _this_, that a mere compact can convert vice into virtue? These advocates of the rightfulness of robbery, because it has been _agreed_, to, and that agreement has been _written down_, have come too late upon the stage, by more than two hundred years. Where does the proud Empire State wish to be recorded in that great history, which is being so rapidly filled out with the records of this "irrepressible conflict"? For myself, a humble citizen of the State, I ask no prouder record for her than that, in the year 1860, she enacted that _the moment a man sets foot on her soil, he is free, against the world_!"