no disposition to meddle with slavery in the old United States.  Perhaps not—­but who shall answer for their successors?  Who shall furnish a pledge that the principle once ingrafted into the Constitution, will not grow, and spread, and fructify, and overshadow the whole land?  It is the natural office of such a principle to wrestle with slavery, wheresoever it finds it.  New States, colonized by the apostles of this principle, will enable it to set on foot a fanatical crusade against all who still continue to tolerate it, although no practicable means are pointed out by which they can get rid of it consistently with their own safety.  At any rate, a present forbearing disposition, in a few or in many, is not a security upon which much reliance can be placed upon a subject as to which so many selfish interests and ardent feelings are connected with the cold calculations of policy.  Admitting, however, that the old United States are in no danger from this principle—­why is it so?  There can be no other answer (which these zealous enemies of slavery can use) than that the Constitution recognizes slavery as existing or capable of existing in those States.  The Constitution, then, admits that slavery and a republican form of government are not incongruous.  It associates and binds them up together and repudiates this wild imagination which the gentlemen have pressed upon us with such an air of triumph.  But the Constitution does more, as I have heretofore proved.  It concedes that slavery may exist in a new State, as well as in an old one—­since the language in which it recognizes slavery comprehends new States as well as actual.  I trust then that I shall be forgiven if I suggest, that no eccentricity in argument can be more trying to human patience, than a formal assertion that a constitution, to which slave-holding States were the most numerous parties, in which slaves are treated as property as well as persons, and provision is made for the security of that property, and even for an augmentation of it by a temporary importation from Africa, with a clause commanding Congress to guarantee a republican form of government to those very States, as well as to others, authorizes you to determine that slavery and a republican form of government cannot coexist.

But if a republican form of government is that in which all the men have a share in the public power, the slave-holding States will not alone retire from the Union.  The constitutions of some of the other States do not sanction universal suffrage, or universal eligibility.  They require citizenship, and age, and a certain amount of property, to give a title to vote or to be voted for; and they who have not those qualifications are just as much disfranchised, with regard to the government and its power, as if they were slaves.  They have civil rights indeed (and so have slaves in a less degree; ) but they have no share in the government.  Their province is to obey the laws, not to assist in making them.