There is another question connected with this negro agitation.  It is in relation to the right to hold slaves in the Territories.  What power has Congress to declare what shall be property?  None, in the territory or elsewhere.  Have the States by separate legislation the power to prescribe the condition upon which a citizen may enter on and enjoy the common property of the United States?  Clearly not.  Shall those who first go into the territory, deprive any citizen of the United States subsequently emigrating thither, of those rights which belong to him as an equal owner of the soil?  Certainly not.  Sovereignty jurisdiction can only pass to these inhabitants when the States, the owners of that territory, shall recognize the inhabitants as an independent community, and admit it to become an equal State of the Union.  Until then the Constitution and laws of the United States must be the rules governing within the limits of a territory.  The Constitution recognizes all property gives equal privileges to every citizen of the States; and it would be a violation of its fundamental principles to attempt any discrimination. [Applause.] Viewed in any of its phases, political, moral, social, general, or local, what is there to sustain this agitation in relation to other people’s negroes, unless it be a bridge over which to pass into office—­a ready capital in politics available to missionaries staving at home-reformers of things which they do not go to learn—­preachers without and audience—­overseers without laborers and without wages—­war-horses who snuff the battle afar off, and cry:  " Aha! aha!  I am afar off from the battle.” [Great laughter and applause.]

Thus it is that the peace of the Union is destroyed; thus it is that brother is arrayed against brother; thus it is that the people come to consider—­not how they can promote each other’s interests, but how they may successfully war upon them.  And the political agitator like the vampire fans the victim to which he clings but to destroy.

Among culprits there is none more odious to my mind than a public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution—­the compact between the States binding each for the common defence and general welfare of the other—­yet retains to himself a mental reservation that he will war upon the principles he has sworn to maintain, and upon the property rights the protection of which are part of the compact of the Union. [Applause.]

It is a crime too low to be named before this assembly:  It is one which no man with self-respect would ever commit.  To swear that he will support the Constitution—­to take an office which belongs in many of its relations to all the States; and to use it as a means of injuring a portion of the States of whom he is thus the representative; is treason to every thing honorable in man.  It is the base and cowardly attack of him who gains the confidence of another, in order that he may wound him. [Applause.]