It is not thus that slavery is to be mitigated or done away. Confine slavery within its present limits, and we may then hope to see it extinguished. We are young, and may outgrow it. There is a great body of active and enlightened philanthropy in the southern states; and it may yet devise means for its extinction. Build around it a circumvallation of freemen, and you render impotent its fearful threatenings. But give to it that principle of indefinite increase which our white population derives from the inexhaustible extent of our country, and you spread it over the face of the Union; you clothe it a hundred fold with terrors; you render it coeval with our empire. But not only this. The slave trade from Africa to the United States will never be abolished, if we allow of slavery to the west of the Mississippi. So great will be the value of slaves along the rich bottoms of that territory, that no laws, however severe, can put a stop to their importation. That accursed traffic is even now carried on with impunity, and to an incredible extent. Fifteen thousand victims have been worse than immolated at its shrine within a single year. With greater temptations to engage in it, in more remote situations, and along an unguarded frontier, no human power can altogether check it. Nor will it be merely a foreign slave trade that this extension will encourage. An internal traffic will take place. The poorer and more healthy states will become the breeders for the new and unhealthy districts; and it will happen as it has ever done, that the pursuit of a trade, wicked and cruel in itself, will entail the commission of crimes, the violation of every moral law, _the begetting of offspring for the purposes of an unholy traffic_. A deadly taint will spread over the morals and character of our country, which not all our professions of liberty can purify; and if there be any prophecy in history, the rights of these long degraded beings will one day be vindicated with awful retribution. I have treated this subject with warmth; with more warmth, perhaps, than has served my cause. But I cannot think without indignation of the attempt which is now making to extend the empire of slavery--a despotism in the bosom of a republic; and which I believe to be pregnant with the most disastrous consequences. It is necessary that the public mind should be kept awake on the subject; and I cannot refrain from lifting up my feeble voice on the occasion.