And yet again:  There are in the United States and Territories, including the District of Columbia, 433,643 free blacks.  At five hundred dollars per head they are worth over two hundred millions of dollars.  How comes this vast amount of property to be running about without owners?  We do not see free horses or free cattle running at large.  How is this?  All these free blacks are the descendants of slaves, or have been slaves themselves; and they would be slaves now but for something which has operated on their white owners, inducing them at vast pecuniary sacrifice to liberate them.  What is that something?  Is there any mistaking it?  In all these cases it is your sense of justice and human sympathy continually telling you that the poor negro has some natural right to himself—­that those who deny it and make mere merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt, and death.

And now why will you ask us to deny the humanity of the slave, and estimate him as only the equal of the hog?  Why ask us to do what you will not do yourselves?  Why ask us to do for nothing what two hundred millions of dollars could not induce you to do?

But one great argument in support of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is still to come.  That argument is “the sacred right of self-government.”  It seems our distinguished Senator has found great difficulty in getting his antagonists, even in the Senate, to meet him fairly on this argument.  Some poet has said: 

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

At the hazard of being thought one of the fools of this quotation, I meet that argument—­I rush in—­I take that bull by the horns.  I trust I understand and truly estimate the right of self-government.  My faith in the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me.  I extend the principle to communities of men as well as to individuals.  I so extend it because it is politically wise, as well as naturally just; politically wise in saving us from broils about matters which do not concern us.  Here, or at Washington, I would not trouble myself with the oyster laws of Virginia, or the cranberry laws of Indiana.  The doctrine of self-government is right,—­absolutely and eternally right,—­but it has no just application as here attempted.  Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such application depends upon whether a negro is or is not a man.  If he is not a man, in that case he who is a man may as a matter of self-government do just what he pleases with him.  But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he too shall not govern himself?  When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—­that is despotism.  If the negro is a man, why, then, my ancient faith teaches me that “all men are created equal,” and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.