In Europe, the tide of liberty, though meeting with obstructions from firm-seated dynasties and time-strengthened prerogative, still rises, and sweeps onward with unebbing flow.

These revolutions are only gigantic struggles of the popular will to escape from oppression; and, at each struggle, the giant snaps a chain.

Great Britain, which in former times sent more vessels to the coast of Africa to kidnap and to transport its natives, than all the other nations of the earth together, now maintains a fleet upon the same coast to suppress the trade she so…

The rights of individuals, not less than the rights of communities, have emerged from oblivion into recognition, and have become law.

Penal codes have been ameliorated, and barbarous customs abolished.

There are now but two places on the globe where a woman can be publicly whipped,--in Hungary and in the Southern States!

Let the high-toned and chivalrous sons of the south,--those “who feel a stain upon their honor like a wound,”--think of all this, as one in the long catalogue of “hazards” upon which they are rushing.

Under God, the men of education, of talent, and of attainment, turn the tides of human affairs.

Where great social distinctions exist, the intelligence and the wealth of a few stimulate or suppress the volition of the masses.

They are the sensorium of the body politic, and their social inferiors are the mighty limbs, which, for good or for evil, they wield.

They can light the torch of civil war, or they can quench it.

But if civil war once blazes forth, it is not given to mortal wisdom to extinguish or control it.

Look at that noble array of principles which is contained in the Declaration of Rights in the constitution of Massachusetts.

Is it not a most grand and beautiful exposition of “the will of God,”--a transcript, as it were, from the Book of Life?

Yet our fathers thought it no tampering with holy things to enact them; and, in times of struggle and peril, they have been to many a tempted man as an anchor to the soul, sure and steadfast.

He makes a donation, a gratuity, of an entire slave state, larger than many a European principality.

He transfers a whole state, with all its beating hearts, present and future; with all its infinite susceptibilities of weal and woe, from the side of freedom to that of slavery, in the ledger book of humanity.

Is a slave state, which dooms our brethren of the human race, perhaps interminably, to the vassal’s fate, so insignificant a trifle, that it may be flung in, as small change on the settlement of an account?

Webster have claimed the four states for freedom, with as sound logic and with far better humanity than he surrendered them all to slavery?

When Texas and the south have got their slave states “to the number of four” into the Union, whence are we to obtain our one or more free states?

I know no mode of recognition that can add a tittle of weight to it.” Catching the tone of his asseveration, I respond that I know no form of statement, nor process of reasoning, which can make it more clear, that this is an absolute and…

According to our convictions, there is no power in any branch of the government, or all its branches, to annex foreign territory to this Union.

We have made the foregoing remarks only to show, that, if any fair construction could show such a power to exist any where, or to be exercised in any form, yet the manner of its exercise now proposed is destitute of all decent semblance of…

Though the annexation of Texas was in pursuance of a void stipulation, yet it is a clear principle of law, that when a contract void between the parties, has been executed by them, it cannot then be annulled.

The resolutions themselves say, in express terms, that the new states are to be admitted “under the provisions of the federal constitution;” and the federal constitution says, “New states may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.”…