The eminent rank, which these United States have so rapidly attained among nations, is mainly attributable to the high dignity and undeviateing rectitude of their public proceedings--to the equal rights and universal freedom of their citizens. Our enemies can cast on us but one reproach, but, of that reproach they are not sparing. Why, they ask, if all men are born free and equal, is the slavery of so large a portion of your inhabitants still continued among you? To this enquiry no better answer can be given than, that at the period of our political emancipation, the situation of the Southern States was supposed to render the measure of domestic emancipation dangerous, if not impracticable. Yet those who had the misfortune to be subjected to this evil, would willingly have commuted a species of precarious and artificial property for any other more substantial in itself, and more consonant with their own moral feelings. It has since been the frequent effort of Southern legislation to diminish the quantity of the evil, which, it is was supposed, could not wholly be removed. Hence their concurrence in the suppression of the slave trade, and hence, in some instances, their refusal to admit other slaves from other States into their own precincts. In all similar efforts, we doubt not that the legislature of the United States would accordingly cooeperate, but the defect of power sometimes impedes the wishes of benevolence and the dispensation of justice. Aware that however consonant the opinions of your honourable body on this subject may be with our own, your constitutional powers as thus limited, we abstain from preferring any request to which you cannot accede; but we respectfully submit that in the late acquisition of an extensive tract, in a great part yet unsettled, the absolute dominion and internal regulation of which belong to Congress alone, the trial might be made, whether a southern latitude necessarily requires the establishment of domestic slavery; or whether in the Territory of Florida, as well as in other places, the cultivation of land, and the general prosperity of the country, would not be eminently promoted by the use of free labor alone. If the few persons who are already settled there, desire to retain their fellow creatures in bondage, let the example of the superior productiveness of free labor be set before their eyes, and let Congress avail itself of the happy opportunity to elevate the Territory itself to a pinnacle of prosperity, while it supports our national character, in the preservation of human rights and consistent justice.