The courts have decided the question so far as they could decide any political question. A case arose in relation to property in a slave held within a Territory where a law of Congress declared that such property should not be held. The whole case was before them; every thing, except the mere technical point that the law was not enacted by a territorial legislature. Why, then, if we are to abide by the decision of the Supreme Court in any future case, do they maintain this controversy on the mere technical point which now divides, disturbs, distracts, destroys the efficiency and the power of the Democratic party? To the Senator, I know, as a question of property, it is a matter of no consequence. I should do him injustice if I left any one to infer that I treated his argument as one made by a man prejudiced against the character of property involved in the question. That is not his position; but I assert that he is pursuing an _ignis fatuus_--not a light caught from the Constitution--but a vapor which has arisen from the corrupting cess-pools of sectional strife, of faction, and individual rivalry. Measured by any standard of common sense, its magnitude would be too small to disturb the adjustment of the balance of our country. There can be no appeal to humanity made upon this basis. Least of all could it be made to one who, like the Senator and myself, has seen this species of property in its sparse condition on the north-western frontier, and seen it go out without disturbing the tranquillity of the community, as it had previously existed without injury to any one, if not to the benefit of the individual who held it. He has no apprehension, he can have none, that it is to retard the political prosperity of the future States--now the Territories. He can have no apprehension that in that country, to which they never would be carried except for domestic purposes, they could ever so accumulate as to constitute a great political element. He knows, and every man who has had experience and judgment must admit, that the few who may be so carried there have nothing to fear but the climate, and that living in that close connection which belongs to one or half a dozen of them in a family, the kindest relations which it is possible to exist between master and dependent, exist between these domestics and their owners.