should come in with slavery if it should so choose.  The southern part, except a portion heretofore mentioned, afterward did come in with slavery, as the State of Arkansas.  All these many years, since 1820, the northern part had remained a wilderness.  At length settlements began in it also.  In due course Iowa came in as a free State, and Minnesota was given a territorial government, without removing the slavery restriction.  Finally, the sole remaining part north of the line—­Kansas and Nebraska—­was to be organized; and it is proposed, and carried, to blot out the old dividing line of thirty-four years’ standing, and to open the whole of that country to the introduction of slavery.  Now this, to my mind, is manifestly unjust.  After an angry and dangerous controversy, the parties made friends by dividing the bone of contention.  The one party first appropriates her own share, beyond all power to be disturbed in the possession of it, and then seizes the share of the other party.  It is as if two starving men had divided their only loaf, the one had hastily swallowed his half, and then grabbed the other’s half just as he was putting it to his mouth.

Let me here drop the main argument, to notice what I consider rather an inferior matter.  It is argued that slavery will not go to Kansas and Nebraska, in any event.  This is a palliation, a lullaby.  I have some hope that it will not; but let us not be too confident.  As to climate, a glance at the map shows that there are five slave States—­Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, and also the District of Columbia, all north of the Missouri Compromise line.  The census returns of 1850 show that within these there are eight hundred and sixty-seven thousand two hundred and seventy-six slaves, being more than one fourth of all the slaves in the nation.

It is not climate, then, that will keep slavery out of these Territories.  Is there anything in the peculiar nature of the country?  Missouri adjoins these Territories by her entire western boundary, and slavery is already within every one of her western counties.  I have even heard it said that there are more slaves in proportion to whites in the northwestern county of Missouri than within any other county in the State.  Slavery pressed entirely up to the old western boundary of the State, and when rather recently a part of that boundary at the northwest was moved out a little farther west, slavery followed on quite up to the new line.  Now, when the restriction is removed, what is to prevent it from going still farther?  Climate will not, no peculiarity of the country will, nothing in nature will.  Will the disposition of the people prevent it?  Those nearest the scene are all in favor of the extension.  The Yankees who are opposed to it may be most flumerous; but, in military phrase, the battlefield is too far from their base of operations.