The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery

ree speech, equal rights and universal suffrage." I pause but a moment here to note the pregnant meaning of this authoritative declaration of the representative man of the Northern sectional party. It means no less than that there shall be no Federal States on this continent where free soil, free labor, free speech, equal rights and universal suffrage shall not prevail. In other words it means that domestic servitude as now known in the Southern States of the American Union, shall be abolished, and that there shall be equal rights and universal suffrage among all the races who may inhabit the American continent. Herein is the end or ultimate goal of the higher law of Mr. Seward, and its coadjutor, "the irrepressible conflict."

Conceding that all these ends shall have been attained and African slavery forever blotted out, still will the doctrine of human equality, which lies at the base of the whole abolition movement in this country, be as far from its perfect realization as now, for the reaso