It finds no model in
any law from Adam till to-day. As Phillips says of Napoleon, the Nebraska
act is grand, gloomy and peculiar, wrapped in the solitude of its own
originality, without a model and without a shadow upon the earth.
In the course of his reply Senator Douglas remarked in substance that he
had always considered this government was made for the white people and
not for the negroes. Why, in point of mere fact, I think so too. But in
this remark of the Judge there is a significance which I think is the key
to the great mistake (if there is any such mistake) which he has made in
this Nebraska measure. It shows that the Judge has no very vivid
impression that the negro is human, and consequently has no idea that
there can be any moral question in legislating about him. In his view the
question of whether a new country shall be slave or free is a matter of
as utter indifference as it is whether his neighbor shall plant his farm
with tobacco or stock it with horned cattle. Now, whether this view is
right or wrong, it is very certain that the great mass of mankind take a
totally different view. They consider slavery a great moral wrong, and
their feeling against it is not evanescent, but eternal.
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