the Louisiana territory acquired from France. No man can show a substantial difference, except that the Kansas and Nebraska law more clearly recognizes the right of the people to decide the question of slavery. Again, I would ask of the men who make this cry of the extension of slavery, to answer in candor: If the Missouri line was a landmark for freedom, was it not also a landmark for slavery? Was not the country south of 36 deg. 30 min., under the law of March 6th 1820, as impliedly devoted to slavery as the country north of it was to freedom? Up to 1848, when California, to which northern men had been led, not more by the love of freedom than by the lust of gold, had declared herself a Free State, had a Free State ever been made south of the Missouri line? Was it not the almost sure result of that line to prevent men who favor Free States from going south of it to demonstrate by experience that Free States could grow and prosper even in a southern clime? Had free labor a fair chance to raise its standard in the south, and try its strength beneath a burning sun, so long as Congress had virtually doomed the land of the south to slave labor, by declaring that the region of free land and free labor was north of the Missouri line? Is it not slavery rather than freedom that needs the protection of positive law? Does the north, guarded as it is by nature's irrepealable law, and by the self-poised and self-reliant strength of its freeborn sons, need the Federal power to guard its soil from the feet of slaves? Is slavery more progressive and expansive than freedom? and are the men who form Free States afraid to meet the men who form Slave States on common ground and take an even chance for control? In a word, do the men who build up free institutions need any thing more from the Federal government than that it should place in their hands the ax and the sword of democracy, and let them alone?