They are such compromises as the wolf offers to the lamb, or the vulture to the dove.

No savage nation, however far removed from the frontiers of civilization, has ever yet been discovered, where these rights were unknown or unhonored.

If one of these coördinate powers in the mental realm be annulled by the legislature, it may be called law; but it is repugnant to every law and attribute of God.

I am interested in nothing else so much as in the attributes of my Creator, and in the relations which he has established between me and himself, for time and for eternity.

Who so base as not to reverence the mighty champions of religious freedom, in days when the dungeon, the rack, and the fagot were the arguments of a government theology?

Who does not reverence, I say, Wickliffe, Huss, Luther, and the whole army of martyrs whose blood reddened the axe of English intolerance?

Yet it was only for this right of private judgment, for this independence of another man’s control in religious concernments, that the godlike champions of religious liberty perilled themselves and perished.

Yet it is this very religious despotism over millions of men which it is now proposed, not to destroy, but to create.

It is proposed not to break old fetters and cast them away, but to forge new ones and rivet them on.

Nowhere, since time began, have the two systems of slave labor and free labor been subjected to so fair and so decisive a trial of their effects on public prosperity as in these United States.

In the older free states are seen all the tokens of prosperity;--a dense and increasing population; thriving villages, towns, and cities; a neat and productive agriculture, growing manufactures, and active commerce.

On the old slave-labored lowlands, a singular phenomena has appeared; there, within the bounds of these rapidly growing United States,--yes, there, population has been long at a stand; yes, over wide regions,--especially in Virginia,--it…

Not war, nor pestilence; not oppression of rulers, civil or ecclesiastical; but slavery, a curse more destructive in its effects than any of them.

It were hard to find, in old king-ridden, priest-ridden, overtaxed Europe, so large a country, where, within twenty years past, such a growing poverty and desolation have appeared.

Many of these multitudes, who have left the slave states, have shunned the regions of slavery, and settled in the free countries of the west.

These were generally industrious and enterprising white men, who found, by sad experience, that a country of slaves was not the country for them.

It is a truth, a certain truth, that slavery drives free laborers,--farmers, mechanics, and all, and some of the best of them too,--out of the country, and fills their places with negroes.

Therefore, since in agriculture slave labor is proved to be far less productive than free labor, slavery is demonstrated to be not only unprofitable, but deeply injurious to the public prosperity.

Agriculture in the slave states may be characterized in general by two epithets, extensive, exhaustive,--which in all agricultural countries forebode two things, impoverishment, depopulation.

The same system was spreading ruin over the provinces, and thus the prosperity of the empire was undermined.

Pliny denounces, as the worst of all, the system of having large estates in the country cultivated by slaves, or indeed, says he, “to have any thing done by men who labor without hope of reward.

The northern freemen come with their ships, carry home the timber and pig iron, work them up, supply their own wants with a part, and then sell the rest at a good profit in the southern markets.

Now, although mechanics, by setting up their shops in the south, could save all these freights and profits, yet so it is, that northern mechanics will not settle in the south, and the southern mechanics are undersold by their northern…

The number of mechanics, in different parts of the south, is in the inverse ratio of the number of slaves; or in other words, where the slaves form the largest proportion of the inhabitants, there the mechanics and manufacturers form the…

So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.