We dispute
their right to go with their servants into territories jointly acquired,
and belonging by constitutional right equally to them as to ourselves.
This, they say, has not been a just and sincere demand for an equitable
division of territory in view of the naturally conflicting interests of
slave labor and free, but rather a vindictive determination to hem in
the slave-holder, to force the scorpion into fires where he shall die of
his own sting, or,--to borrow the metaphor, with the language, of a
present Senator from Massachusetts,--where the 'poisoned rat shall die
in his own hole.'
"Two confederacies or one, our prospect is fearful if we continue to
feel and act toward each other after this temper, and to cherish our
respective grievances."
"There is another side to all this," said Mr. North. "I ascribe the
excitement at the South to the loss on their part of political power, or
to a grasping spirit which breaks compromises, and which requires that
the national legislation be always shaped in its favor."
"But," said I, "if we can trust the convictions of just men, in private
life, at the South,--men removed from all suspicion as to the purity of
their motives,--it is certain that our Northern feelings toward
slave-holders, and the expressions of those feelings in ways which have
been applauded among us for many years, are the real causes of the
irritation and exasperation which have brought us to the present brink.
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