"Mr. President," said he, "in the excited times in which we live there is found to exist a state of crimination and recrimination between the North and South. There are lists of grievances produced by each, and those grievances, real or supposed, alienate the minds of one portion of the country from the other, exasperate the feelings, and subdue the sense of fraternal affection, patriotic love, and mutual regard. I shall bestow a little attention, sir, upon these various grievances existing on the one side and on the other. I begin with _complaints of the South_. I will not answer further than I have the general statements of the honorable Senator from South Carolina, that the North has prospered at the expense of the South, in consequence of the manner of administering this Government, in the collecting of its revenues, and so forth. These are disputed topics, and I have no inclination to enter into them. But I will allude to other complaints of the South, and _especially to one which has, in my opinion, just foundation_; and that is, that there has been found at the North, among individuals and among legislators, a disinclination to perform fully their constitutional duties in regard to the return of persons bound to service who have escaped into the Free States. In that respect the South, in my judgment, is right, and the North is wrong. Every member of any Northern Legislature is bound by oath, like every other officer in the country, to support the Constitution of the United States; and the article of the Constitution (Art. iv., sec. 2, subd. 2) which says to these States that they shall deliver up fugitives from service, is as binding in honor and conscience as any other article. No man fulfills his duty in any Legislature who sets himself to find excuses, evasions, escapes, from this constitutional obligation. I have always thought that the Constitution addressed itself to the Legislatures of the States, or to the States themselves. It says that those persons escaping to other States 'shall be delivered up;' and I confess I have always been of the opinion that it was an injunction upon the States themselves. When it is said that a person escaping into another State, and coming, therefore, within the jurisdiction of that State, shall be delivered up, it seems to me the import of the clause is, that the State itself, in obedience to the Constitution, shall cause him to be delivered up. That is my judgment. I have always entertained that opinion, and I entertain it now. But when the subject, some years ago, was before the Supreme Court of the United States, the majority of the Judges held that the power to cause fugitives from service to be delivered up was a power to be exercised under the authority of this Government. I do not know, on