We of the South, I know, are arraigned, and many believe justly, for starting a new question which distracts the Democratic party. I have endeavored, therefore, to show that it is not new. I have also asserted, what I think is clear, that if it were new, but yet a constitutional right, it is not only our province, but our duty to assert it--to assert it whenever or wherever that right is controverted. It is asserted now with more force than at a former period, for the simple reason that it is now denied, to an extent which has never been known before. We do not seek, in the cant language of the day, to force slavery on an unwilling people. We know full well there is no power to do it; and our limited observation has not yet made us acquainted with the man who was likely to have a slave forced upon him, or who could get one without paying a very high price for him. He must first have the will, and, secondly, he must put money in his purse to enable him to get one. They are too valuable among those by whom they are now owned, to be forced upon any body. Not admitting the correctness of the doctrine which the Senator promulgated in his magazine article in relation to a local character of slave property, I recognise the laws of nature, and that immigration will follow in the lines where any species of labor may be most profitably employed; all, therefore, we have asked--fulfillment of the original compact of our fathers--was that there should be no discrimination; that all property should be equally protected; that we should be permitted to go into every portion of the United States save where some sovereign power has said slaves shall not be held, and to take with us our slave property in like manner as we would take any other; no more than that. For that, our Government has contended on the high seas against foreign powers. That has entered into our negotiations, and has been recognized by every government against whom a claim has been asserted. Where our property was captured on the land during the period of an invasion, Great Britain, by treaty, restored it, or paid for it. Wherever it has suffered loss on the high seas, down to a very recent period, we have received indemnity; and where we have not, it was only because the power and duty of the Federal Government was sacrificed to this miserable strife in relation to property, with the existence of which, those making the interference had no municipal connection, or moral responsibility. I do not admit that sovereignty necessarily exists in the Federal Government or in a territorial government. I deny the Senator's proposition, which is broadly laid down, of the necessity which must exist for it in the one place or the other. I hold that sovereignty exists only in a State, or in the United States in their associated capacity, to whom sovereignty may be transferred, but that their agent is incapable of receiving it, and, still more, of transferring it to territorial inhabitants.