But granting that the terms of the Constitution are ambiguous—­that they are susceptible of two meanings, if the unanimous, concurrent, unbroken practice of every department of the Government, judicial, legislative, and executive, and the acquiescence of the whole people for fifty years do not prove which is the true construction, then how and where can such a question ever be settled?  If the people and the Courts of the land do not know what they themselves mean, who has authority to settle their meaning for them?

If then the people and the Courts of a country are to be allowed to determine what their own laws mean, it follows that at this time and for the last half century, the Constitution of the United States, has been, and still is, a pro-slavery instrument, and that any one who swears to support it, swears to do pro-slavery acts, and violates his duty both as a man and an abolitionist.  What the Constitution may become a century hence, we know not; we speak of it as it is, and repudiate it as it is.

But the purpose, for which we have thrown these pages before the community, is this.  Some men, finding the nation unanimously deciding that the Constitution tolerates slavery, have tried to prove that this false construction, as they think it, has been foisted in upon the instrument by the corrupting influence of slavery itself, tainting all it touches.  They assert that the known anti-slavery spirit of revolutionary times never could have consented to so infamous a bargain as the Constitution is represented to be, and has in its present hands become.  Now these pages prove the melancholy fact that willingly, with deliberate purpose, our fathers bartered honesty for gain and became partners with tyrants that they might share in the profits of their tyranny.

And in view of this fact, will it not require a very strong argument to make any candid man believe, that the bargain which the fathers tell us they meant to incorporate into the Constitution, and which the sons have always thought they found there incorporated, does not exist there after all?  Forty of the shrewdest men and lawyers in the land assemble to make a bargain, among other things, about slaves,—­after months of anxious deliberation they put it into writing and sign their names to the instrument,—­fifty years roll away, twenty millions at least of their children pass over the stage of life,—­courts sit and pass judgment,—­parties arise and struggle fiercely; still all concur in finding in the Instrument just that meaning which the fathers tell us they intended to express:—­must not he be a desperate man, who, after all this, sets out to prove that the fathers were bunglers and the sons fools, and that slavery is not referred to at all?

Besides, the advocates of this new theory of the Anti-slavery character of the Constitution, quote some portions of the Madison Papers in support of their views,—­and this makes it proper that the community should hear all that these Debates have to say on the subject.  The further we explore them, the clearer becomes the fact that the Constitution was meant to be, what it has always been esteemed, a compromise between slavery and freedom.