Stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

It is a grave question for lovers of the Union, whether the final destruction of the Missouri Compromise, and with it the spirit of all compromise, will or will not embolden and embitter each of these, and fatally increase the number of…

These sympathies in the bosoms of the Southern people manifest in many ways their sense of the wrong of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the negro.

The great majority, South as well as North, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibility to physical pain.

But while you thus require me to deny the humanity of the negro, I wish to ask whether you of the South, yourselves, have ever been willing to do as much?

Now, I admit that this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and slaves.

A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded.

My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.

I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon.

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.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise; repeal all compromises; repeal the Declaration of Independence; repeal all past history,--you still cannot repeal human nature.

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?

The doctrine of self-government is right,--absolutely and internally right; but it has no just application as here attempted.

You despise him utterly; you do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man.

What I do say is that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

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.

They are just what we would be in their situation.

I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself.

This declared indifference, but, as I must think, real, covert zeal, for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate.

If the negro is a man, 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.

We know that some Southern men do free their slaves, go North and become tip-top Abolitionists, while some Northern ones go South and become most cruel slave-masters.

Advancement--improvement in condition--is the order of things in a society of equals.

The hired labourer of yesterday labours on his own account to-day, and will hire others to labour for him to-morrow.

There is no permanent class of hired labourers amongst us.

Originally a curse for transgression upon the whole race, when, as by slavery, it is concentrated on a part only, it becomes the double-refined curse of God upon his creatures.