All good men have an interest in answering these questions. But above all others, the laboring man has a deeper interest. The greatest disgrace inflicted upon labor is inflicted by the institution of slavery. Those who support it--we mean the negro-owners, or the negro-drivers of the South--openly declare that he who works with his hands is on the level with the slave. They cannot think otherwise, so long as they are educated under the influence of this dreadful injustice. It perverts all the true relations of society, and corrupts every humane and generous sentiment. Welles published in the _Evening Post_ after the election an unsigned article denouncing the tyranny of party allegiance, but Bryant’s journal did not yet forsake Democracy. As a Democratic organ still it boasted that it published the party’s widest-circulated weekly paper. As a Democratic organ it remarked of Polk, when he went out of office in 1849, that “such Presidents as he are only accidents, and two such accidents are not at all likely to be visited upon a single miserable generation”--an assertion which Pierce and Buchanan soon confuted. Bennett’s _Herald_, with its instinct for the winning side, having climbed on the Taylor bandwagon, the _Evening Post_ was for some years the only Democratic newspaper in this great Democratic city. As a free-soil Democratic organ it opposed the Compromise of 1850, finding a peculiar relish in attacking any proposal originated by Clay, and supported by the equally distasteful Whig and protectionist, Webster. Like Chase and Welles, Bryant and Bigelow saw the plain objections to any compromise. The crisis had been precipitated by the demand for the admission of California, and the question was whether this admission should be purchased by large concessions to the South, or--as the _Evening Post_ maintained--demanded as a right. The chief proposals of Clay were that California should be admitted as free territory, that Territorial Governments be erected in the rest of the Mexican cession without any restriction upon slavery, that the slave trade be prohibited in the District of Columbia, and that a new and atrociously-framed law for the return of fugitive slaves be enacted.