Every new concession transfers strength from our side to the side of our opponents; and if we cannot arrest our own course when we are just entering the rapids, how can we arrest it when we come near the verge of the cataract?

The south may rule the Union, but they cannot divide it.

With these advantages, let us never aggress upon their rights, but let us maintain our own.

A single vote may turn the scale, and Massachusetts may give that vote.

Let every lover of freedom do his best and his most.

It is, that New Mexico will do for herself what we shall have basely failed to do for her.

If both these hopes fail, our country is doomed to run its unobstructed career of conquest, of despotism, and of infamy.

The idea that Massachusetts should contribute or consent to the extension of human slavery!--is it not enough, not merely to arouse the living from their torpor, but the dead from their graves!

At Lexington, at Concord, and on Bunker Hill, the grass still grows greener where the soil was fattened with the blood of our fathers.

If, in the providence of God, we must be vanquished in this contest, let it be by force of the overmastering and inscrutable powers above us, and not by our own base desertion.

A man may not lose his horse without a right to this trial, but he may lose his freedom.

I must now, however, be permitted to add that the highest eminence becomes unenviable when it breeds intolerance of dissent, or bars out the humblest man from a free expression of opinion.

I protest against and impugn this method of proceeding, by any man, however high, against any man, however humble.

But the opinion expressed by me on this point does not need the authority of any name to support it; and the illustration which I gave is not only intelligible to every sensible man, but is also apposite.

Webster’s comment is, that this case, “if it have any analogy to the matter,” means, that if a man’s horse “stray into his neighbor’s field, he cannot lead him back without a previous trial by jury to ascertain the right.” Was ever the…

Webster may pitch somersets with his own doctrines, but he has no right to pitch them with mine.

I said a man may not lose his horse, or his property in a horse, without a right to the trial by jury.

Does not this hold a man’s freedom to be of less value than twenty dollars?

If two adverse claimants contest title to an alleged slave, whose market value is more than this sum, each is entitled to a jury to try the fact of ownership.

But if the alleged slave declares, here, in Massachusetts, that he owns himself, he is debarred from this right.

Did oppression ever before conceive such a tribunal, so countless in numbers, so ample in jurisdiction, so terrible in power?

What aggravates the wrong, is, that the cruelties of the measure will fall upon the poor, the helpless, the ignorant, the unfriended.

The bill would have been far less disgraceful, had its provisions borne upon the men who should pass it; because, in such case, there would have been a touch of equality.

Now, if this bill does not “deride” all guaranties for the protection of human liberty, it is only because my word of reprobation is too weak.

It is only because one needs “to tear a leaf from the curse-book of Pandemonium” in order to describe it by fitting epithets.