to do, is so to shape his administration as to bring the question in its proper form before the American people. He must show the South that the security of slave property and the extension of slave territory have no necessary connection, perhaps are incompatible one with the other, and the North that opposition to the extension of slavery into territory where it cannot go constitutionally does not involve abolitionism, and may be consistent with the most scrupulous respect for the rights of slave property in its own locality. All the great body of the Southern people want is security for their property in slaves; all the great body of the Northern people think of asking is security that slavery shall not leap its present bounds, and become the dominant interest of the country. Mr. Buchanan, then, must make his appeal distinctly to the great body of the people both North and South, and show by his appointments and the measures he adopts or recommends that, as far as depends on his government, the slaveholding States shall be protected in all their constitutional rights, and no countenance will be given either to the party of abolition or the party of extension. This is what is imposed upon him as a constitutional President, and if distinctly adopted and carried out with resolution and impartiality, the administration will be brought back to Union principles, and the demagogues whether Northern or Southern will be defeated. This is the work Mr. Buchanan has been elected to perform, and which he must perform if he means even to retain power in the hands of the Democratic party.

In urging this Union policy upon the incoming administration against the abolition party on the one hand and the slavery extension party on the other, we are warring against the just rights of no section, we are simply warring against sectionalism, whether Northern or Southern. The Federal government was instituted for the common weal of all the States, and its utility depends on its confining itself to the interests common to all sections of the Union. We do not, in asking the administration to discountenance the slavery extension party, ask it to interfere positively to prevent the extension of slavery to new territory, but not to interfere to favor it. Slavery cannot extend legally beyond the present Slave States into territory not yet erect

ed into States, without the positive action of the Federal government; and the only concession to the North we ask is, that that action shall be withheld, for it is both dangerous and unconstitutional. All the concession we ask for the South is, that the question of slavery be excluded from Federal politics, and left to be disposed of by the States, by each State, when a State, for itself, and as regards the Territories by the Federal Courts. More than this neither the North nor the South has any real interest in demanding, and to demand more may be to get less.

The admirers of slavery, whether Northern or Southern, must know that they stand very much alone, and that it is too late to attempt to make converts to the slave system. Say what we will, slavery is regarded by the civilized world as an odious institution, as well as by the great mass of the people of the Free States, and even the people of the Slave States themselves are very far from being unanimous in their admiration of it. We have found as much genuine, honest abolition sentiment in the Slave States as we have ever found in the Free States, and the Southern politicians, who talk so violently against the Northern Yankees, know very well that it requires the most strenuous efforts on their part to retain their hold on their constituents. Most of their declamation is intended for effect at home rather than abroad. For ourselves personally, we would not emancipate the slave population at the South, if we had the power, not, indeed, because we like slavery, but because, with all the study we have been able to give to the subject, we can discover no condition possible at present for the mass of that population superior to that in which they now are. Humanity towards that population, if nothing else, would prevent us from being an abolitionist. But the South cannot be ignorant that she has the civilized world against her, and, if she seeks in earnest to foist her domestic institutions on territory under the Constitution now free, she will meet in the Free States a resistance, which even her chivalry will not be able to withstand. The Free States are determined that there shall be no further extension of slave territory to the North or to the South, and the immense pluralities in the late election for Colonel Fremont prove that their resolution in this respect is not to be despised; and yet Colonel Fremont himself did not command

the full vote of the party opposed to slavery extension. If his election had turned on that question alone, he would have swept by overwhelming majorities every non-slaveholding State in the Union, and perhaps have carried two or three even of the Slave States. This should admonish the incoming administration that no strengthening and consolidating of the slave interest beyond its strict constitutional rights, can be prudently attempted. The Free States will not consent to be governed by that interest. Southern politicians and Southern journals may threaten secession, may talk disunion, may advocate a Southern slaveholding confederacy, but it will not move the mass of the people in the Free States. If the controversy proceeds to blows, they will give as well as receive, and perhaps not be the first to yield. If worst comes to worst, the old battle of the Puritans and the Cavaliers will be fought over again, and the party opposed to slavery extension will then, in spite of all that can be said, be an abolition party, and the cry will be "freedom to the slave," instead of the old cry of "a godly reformation of the Church and State." The South cannot afford to provoke such a conflict, for in it the moral sense of the civilized world would be with the North, which would be cheered on as the champion of freedom.

But we have not the slightest fear of a civil war. There is too much good sense and good feeling in all sections, and too ardent a love for the Union to permit it; and on neither side will it get beyond the bullying point. Yet the South can no more safely press slavery extension than the North can abolition principles and movements. Either is pregnant with danger, and should be abandoned. Let the abolition movement be restrained, and the slavery extension movement can be easily defeated; let the slavery extension policy be withdrawn, and we can easily confine abolitionism to a few harmless men and women who find their dissipation in philanthropy instead of theatres, routs, and balls. Both movements must be suppressed, and the policy of the incoming administration must be to suppress them by favoring neither, and by resisting each when it seeks either to control or to embarrass it. In doing so, we do not say Mr. Buchanan will escape opposition or obloquy; he will no doubt be accused of want of fidelity to the Cincinnati Platform, of betraying the South, or of

courting the North; but he will, if he does it openly, decidedly, bravely, be sustained, for the people know that the only Platform he is at liberty to consult is the Constitution, and the only party to which he is responsible is the party of the Union. He has not been elected to carry out the will of any sectional party, Northern or Southern, Eastern or Western; but to administer the government for four years on constitutional principles, and with sole reference to those rights and interests which are common to all the States. Let him feel that, and take his stand above party, command party, not serve it, and the country will sustain him, and honor him as one of her greatest and most deserving Presidents.

We know the slavery question is one of great delicacy, but it must be resolutely faced, and both sections must give up something. The South must yield its assumed right to transport slave property into Territories not yet erected into States, and the North must yield its pretension to the right of Congress to refuse to admit a State into the Union, whose constitution does not exclude slavery. The Southern claim is unfounded because the right of property in slaves is local, not general; and the Northern pretension is unconstitutional, because Congress has no right to examine the constitution of a sovereign State any farther than to ascertain that it is not anti-republican or incompatible with the Constitution of the United States. Under our system it is neither anti-republican nor unconstitutional for a State to authorize slavery. The people of the State, not of the Territory, have the undoubted constitutional right, within its own jurisdiction, to establish or to prohibit slavery as they please; and to the people of the State,-not of the Territory, as says the Kanzas-Nebraska Bill,-the disposition of the question must be left. This may not prevent the extension of slavery into new States after their formation as States; but it will prevent its extension by the aid of the Federal government, which is all that the anti-slavery extension party can constitutionally insist upon, or attempt by political action. With this both sections must be contented. Any claim on either side beyond will only provoke exaggeration on the other, and render internal peace impracticable.

There must, again, be no talk of reviving the African slave trade. The slave trade is placed by the Constitution under the authority of Congress, and the Union has the constitutional right to act on it. No doubt our Northern and Eastern cities swarm with Mammon-worshippers anxious to have the trade re-opened, and ready to enter into it with all their Yankee energy and perseverance; but that traffic is infamous, and by nearly all civilized nations is declared to be piracy. Were we to re-open it we should become for ever infamous. It is almost enough to make an honest man turn abolitionist to find slavery so blunting the moral sense as to permit men otherwise honorable and high-minded to broach, even in conversation, a thing so infamous. We confess what we have read in respectable Southern journals, and heard talked by men of high character in regard to re-opening the African slave trade has shocked us, and greatly modified our feelings on the subject of slavery. That traffic was condemned by the Church as long ago as 1482, and the condemnation has been renewed by successive Popes down to our own times. The Catholic who engages in it, who reduces the African negro to slavery, or who buys and holds as a slave any one so reduced from a state of freedom, is ipso facto excommunicated. No class of citizens have more uniformly or more faithfully supported the constitutional rights of the slaveholding States than Catholics, both North and South. With us it has been a point of conscience, of religion to be loyal to the Union, loyal to the Constitution, and it has been a sense of duty to the Union, to the Constitution, that has made us here at the North vote in almost one solid phalanx for Mr. Buchanan, against what we regarded as Northern sectionalism. None of us like slavery, none of us wish to perpetuate it; we all of us love freedom, and hold all men to be equal under the law of nature; but we all respect vested rights, and our respect for the constitutional rights of the slaveholding States, has led us to vote, often much against our personal interests, with the South. But we can never support any party in so infamous a project as that of re-opening the African slave trade, a trade which our religion condemns, and which has brought a curse upon every Catholic State that has permitted it. We regard it with horror, and must oppose