The Kansas-Nebraska Bill having agreed the right for which I contend to be the subject of judicial decision; it having specially provided the mode and facilitated the process by which that right should be brought to the courts and finally decided; not allowing any check to be interposed because of amount, that bill having continued the provision which had been introduced into the New Mexico Bill, how are we to understand the Senator's declarations, that, let the Supreme Court decide as they may, the inhabitants of a Territory may lawfully admit or exclude slavery as they please? What a hollow promise was given to us in the provision referring this vexed question to judicial decision, in order that we might reach a point on which we might peacefully rest, if the inhabitants of the Territories for which Congress had legislated could still decide the question and set aside any decision of the Supreme Court, and do this lawfully. I ask, was it not to give us a stone, when he promised us bread; to incorporate a provision in the organic act securing the right of appeal to the courts, if, as now stated, those courts were known to be powerless to grant a remedy? Here there is a very broad distinction to be drawn between the power of the inhabitants of a Territory, or of any local community, lawfully to do a thing, and forcibly to do it. If the Senator had said, that whatever might be the decision of the Supreme Court, whatever might be the laws of Congress, whatever might be the laws of the Territories, in the face of an infuriated mob, such as he described on another occasion, it would be impossible for a man to hold a slave against their will, he would but have avowed the truism that in our country the law waits upon public opinion. But he says that they can do it lawfully. If his position had been such as I have just stated, it would have struck me as the opinion I had always supposed him to entertain. More than that, it would have struck me as the opinion which no one could gainsay; which, at any time, I would have been ready to admit. Nothing is more clear than that no law could prevail in our country, where force, as a governmental mean, is almost unknown, against a pervading sentiment in the community. Every body admits that; and it was in that view of the case that this question has been so often declared to be a mere abstraction. It is an abstraction so far as any one would expect in security to hold against the fixed purpose and all-pervading will of the community, whether territorial or other, a species of property, ambulatory, liable, because it has mind enough to go, to be enticed away whenever freed from physical restraint, and which would be nearly valueless if so restrained. It may be an abstraction as a practical question of pecuniary advantage, but it is not the less dear to those who assert the constitutional right. It would constitute a very good reason why no one should ever say there was an attempt to force slavery on