And what is "a republican form of government?" It is where the government is a commonwealth--the property of the public, of the mass of the people, or of the entire people. It is where the government is made up of, and controlled by the combined will and power of the public, or the mass of the people--and where, of natural consequence, it will have, for its object, the protection of the rights of all. It is indispensable to a republican form of government, that the public, the mass of the people, if not the entire people, participate in the grant of powers to the government, and in the protection afforded by the government. It is impossible, therefore, that a government, under which any considerable number of the people, (if indeed any number of the people,) are disfranchised and enslaved, can be a republic. A slave government is an oligarchy; and one too of the most arbitrary and criminal character. Strange that men, who have eyes capable of discovering in the constitution so many covert, implied and insinuated guaranties of crime and slavery, should be blind to the legal import of so open, explicit and peremptory a guaranty of freedom, equality and right. Even if there had really been, in the constitution, two such contradictory guaranties, as one of liberty or republicanism in every state of the Union, and another of slavery in every state where one portion of the people might succeed in enslaving the rest, one of these guaranties must have given way to the other--for, being plainly inconsistent with each other, they could not have stood together. And it might safely have been left either to legal or to moral rules to determine which of the two should prevail--whether a provision to perpetuate slavery should triumph over a guaranty of freedom.