The Cass County Republican. [volume] (Dowagiac, Mich.) 18??-1880, 1860-09-20

Dy ODe0ience TO the same moral laws
which direct individual life, that they
are written in its original constitution,
and it must continually reform itself
according to the spirit of those laws,
or perish.
My humble advice, then, fellow-citi.
zens, is, that we return and re-establish
the original policy of the nation, and
henceforth hold, as we did in the be-
ginning, that slavery is and must be
only a purely local, temporary and ex-
ceptional institution, confined within
the slave States where it already exists.
while Freedom is the general, normal,
enduring and permanent condition of
society within the. jurisdiction, and
under the authority of the Constitution
of the United States.
l counsel thus for simple reason
incapable of illumination. Slavery.
however it may be at any time or in
any place excused, is at all times and
everywhere unjust and inhuman it its
very nature; while freedom, however
it may be at any time or in any place
neglected, denied, or abused, is in its
nature right, just and benefcent. It
can never, under any circumstances,
be wise to persevere voluntarily, in ex-
tending or fortifying an institution that
is intrinsically wrong or cruel. 1t can
never be unwise wherever it is possible,
to defend and fortify an existing insti-
tuition that is founded on the rights of
Human Nature. Insomuch as opinions
are so materially, and yet so uncon-
sciously affected and modified by time,
place and circumstances, we may hold
these great truths firmly, without i'm
peaching the convictions or the motives
OF those who deny them in argument
or in practice.
counsel thus for another reason
quite as simple AS the first. knowledge,
emulation and independence among the
members of social state are the chief
elements of national wealth, strength
and power. Ignorance, Incidence and
bondage of individuals are always
sources of national imbecility and de-
cline. All nations in their turn have
practiced slavery. Most of them have
abolished it. The world over, the
wealthiest and most powerful nations
have been those w67sh tolerated it least,
and which earliest and most completely
abolished it. Virginia and Texas are
thrown into panic even now by the
appearance or even the suspicion of a
handful of men within their borders,
instigating civil war. Massachusetts
and Vermont defied British invasion,
backed by treason, eighty years ago.
Thirdly, there is no necessity now to
fortify or extend slavery within the
United States or on the American
continent. All the supposed necessities
of that sort ever before known. have
passed away forever. Let us briefly
review them. With the discovery and
conquest of America confessedly came
a responsibility to reclaim it from nature
and to introduce civilization. Unfortu-
nately Spain and Portugal, the dis
coverers and conquerors, were, of all
the European States in the sixteenth
century, the worst qualified and least
able to colonize. They were neither
populous, nor industrious, nor free; but
were nations of princes and subjects;
of soldiers, navigators, mobiles, priests,
poets and scholars, without merchants,
mechanics, farmers, or laborers. The
art of navigation was imperfect; its
practice dangerous, and the new world
that the Pope had divided between his
two most loyal crown wearing children
was in its natural state pestilential.
IL
impracticable. In the emergency the
conquerors, with ruffian violence, swept
off at once the gold and silver orna.
ments which they found in the temples
and of their European values, and
subjugated and enslaved the natives
themselves. But these simple children
of the forest, like the wild flowers when
the hurricane sweeps over the prairies,
perished under cruelties so contrary to
nature.
| The African trade in prisoners of
war saved from slaughter, afforded an
alternative. The chiefs sold ten men,
women or children, for single horse.
The conquerors of America brought
this unnatural merchandise to our
coasts. When the English colonists of
North America, happily in only very
limited degree, borrowed from their
predecessors this bad practice of
slavery. they borrowed also its wretched
apology, want of an adequate supply
of free labor. 1t was then thought an
exercise of christian benevolence to
rescue the African heather from eternal
suffering in future state and though
the painful path of earthly bondage to
open to him the gates of the celestial
paradise. But all this is now changed.
We are at last no feeble or sickly col.
enies, but a great, populous, homo
geneous nation, unsurpassed and un.
equaled in all the elements of coloniza
ton and civilization. Free labor here
continually increases and abounds, and
is fast verging towards European stand
ards of value. There is not one acre
too much in our broad domain for the
supply of even three generations Of
our free population, with their certain
increase. Immigration from Europe is
crowding our own sons into the Western
region, and this movement is daily
augmented by the application of new
machines for diminishing mechanical
and even agricultural labor. At this