A life devoted to it would be nobly spent or sacrificed.

Egotism, Virginian aristocracy, slave-purging liberty, religion, literature, science, wit, fancy, generous feelings, and malignant passions, constitute a chaos in his mind, from which nothing orderly can ever flow.

The fault is in the constitution of the United States, which has sanctioned a dishonorable compromise with slavery.

It is a contemplation not very creditable to human nature that the cement of common interest, produced by slavery, is stronger and more solid than that of unmingled freedom.

In this instance the slave states have clung together in one unbroken phalanx, and have been victorious by the means of accomplices and deserters from the ranks of freedom.

Adams replied that this confounding the ideas of servitude and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery.

It is in truth all perverted sentiment; mistaking labor for slavery, and dominion for freedom.

They disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all on the shoulders of 'old grandame Great Britain.' But, when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vain-glory in their very…

They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen, who labor for subsistence.

They look down on the simplicity of Yankee manners, because they have no habits of overbearing like theirs, and cannot treat negroes like dogs.

It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very source of moral principle.

It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice; for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine, which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend on the color of the skin?

But perhaps it would have been a wiser and bolder course to have persisted in the restriction on Missouri, until it should have terminated in a convention of the states to revise and amend the constitution.

This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen states unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object, that of rallying to their standard the other states, by the universal emancipation of their slaves.

If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break.

It came originally from the devil.--'Doth Job serve God for naught?' The selfish and the social passions are intermingled in the conduct of every man acting in a public capacity.

And it is no just cause of reproach to any man, that, in promoting to the utmost of his power the public good, he is desirous; at the same time, of promoting his own.

There are, no doubt, hypocrites of humanity as well as of religion; men with cold hearts and warm professions, trading upon benevolence, and using justice and virtue only as stakes upon the turn of a card or the cast of a die.

Many of our public men have principles too pliable to popular impulse, but few are deliberately dishonest; and there is not a man in the Union of purer integrity than Rufus King.

The result affords an illustration of the remark, how much more keen and powerful the impulse is of personal interest than is that of any general consideration of benevolence and humanity.

All which, he said, should be done, not to violate, but to redeem from violation, the constitution of the United States.

If acquiesced in, it will change the terms of the federal compact--change its terms by robbing thousands of citizens of their rights.

This barbarous article deprives them of the little remnant of right yet left them--their rights as citizens and as men.

Weak and defenceless as they are, so much the more sacred the obligation of the Legislatures of the states to which they belong to defend their lawful rights.

These have been, through life, perpetual admonitions to do nothing unworthy of it.