But it is said there now is no law in Nebraska on the subject of slavery, and that, in such case, taking a slave there operates his freedom.  That is good book-law, but it is not the rule of actual practice.  Wherever slavery is it has been first introduced without law.  The oldest laws we find concerning it are not laws introducing it, but regulating it as an already existing thing.  A white man takes his slave to Nebraska now.  Who will inform the negro that he is free?  Who will take him before court to test the question of his freedom?  In ignorance of his legal emancipation he is kept chopping, splitting, and plowing.  Others are brought, and move on in the same track.  At last, if ever the time for voting comes on the question of slavery the institution already, in fact, exists in the country, and cannot well be removed.  The fact of its presence, and the difficulty of its removal, will carry the vote in its favor.  Keep it out until a vote is taken, and a vote in favor of it cannot be got in any population of forty thousand on earth, who have been drawn together by the ordinary motives of emigration and settlement.  To get slaves into the Territory simultaneously with the whites in the incipient stages of settlement is the precise stake played for and won in this Nebraska measure.

The question is asked us:  “If slaves will go in notwithstanding the general principle of law liberates them, why would they not equally go in against positive statute law—­go in, even if the Missouri restriction were maintained!” I answer, because it takes a much bolder man to venture in with his property in the latter case than in the former; because the positive Congressional enactment is known to and respected by all, or nearly all, whereas the negative principle that no law is free law is not much known except among lawyers.  We have some experience of this practical difference.  In spite of the Ordinance of ’87, a few negroes were brought into Illinois, and held in a state of quasi-slavery, not enough, however, to carry a vote of the people in favor of the institution when they came to form a constitution.  But into the adjoining Missouri country, where there was no Ordinance of ’87,—­was no restriction,—­they were carried ten times, nay, a hundred times, as fast, and actually made a slave State.  This is fact-naked fact.

Another lullaby argument is that taking slaves to new countries does not increase their number, does not make any one slave who would otherwise be free.  There is some truth in this, and I am glad of it; but it is not wholly true.  The African slave trade is not yet effectually suppressed; and, if we make a reasonable deduction for the white people among us who are foreigners and the descendants of foreigners arriving here since 1808, we shall find the increase of the black population outrunning that of the white to an extent unaccountable, except by supposing that some of them, too, have been coming from Africa.  If this be so, the opening of new countries to the institution increases the demand for and augments the price of slaves, and so does, in fact, make slaves of freemen, by causing them to be brought from Africa and sold into bondage.