To sum up what I have said on this part of my argument, the proposition is simply this: The Constitution, considered as a whole, and interpreted as it should be, as the act of a moral person, made for great moral and political ends, and not by the mere technical rules which lawyers or impracticable theorists would apply to it, requires that the people of a territory or inchoate State of the United States, preparatory to their admission to the rank of a full grown State within the Union, shall have as full power, through a legislature of their own choosing, to deal with the subject of domestic slavery, and with other subjects of domestic concern, as is possessed by the people of States in the Union. In other words, I say, that whatever may be the right and duty of Congress under the Constitution to guard and protect the territories from internal or foreign violence, and to maintain their allegiance to the Union, it is neither the right nor duty of Congress, under the Constitution, to interfere with the question of slavery or any other domestic question, so long as the people of the territories are faithful to their allegiance to the Constitution and the Federal Republic. I now proceed to state and confirm by brief historic evidence a proposition already implied in what I have said upon the compromise character of the Constitution and the ordinance of 1787. It is this: The action of the Federal government on the subject of slavery has been essentially compromise action. It recognizes the principle of the co-existence and extension of Free States and Slave States, under and within the confederacy, leaving the ultimate of the question of abolition or extension, not with the Congress, but with the people of the several States. Congress has never rightfully taken sides on this question; for while on the one hand slavery has been forbidden in some territories, it has been permitted in others. Slave territory and free territory have alike been acquired by treaty, and Slave States and Free States alike admitted to the Union. The action of Congress is therefore no precedent for absolute slavery prohibition or indefinite slavery extension. Having never been exercised but by way of compromise it commits the government to neither extreme and is not a conclusive precedent for the constitutional power of Congress over the subject. I shall briefly notice the facts of history bearing on this proposition.