In
Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland, at different times,
strong movements have been made for emancipation,--movements enforced
by a comparison of the progressive march of the adjoining free States
with the poverty and sterility and ignorance produced by a system
which in a few years wastes and exhausts all the resources of the soil
without the power of renewal.
The time cannot be distant when these States will emancipate for self-
preservation; and if no new slave territory be added, the increase of
slave population in the remainder will enforce measures of
emancipation.
Here, then, is the point of the battle. Unless more slave territory is
gained, slavery dies; if it is gained, it lives. Around this point
political parties fight and manoeuvre, and every year the battle wages
hotter.
The internal struggles of no other nation in the world are so
interesting to Europeans as those of America; for America is fast
filling up from Europe, and every European has almost immediately his
vote in her councils.
If, therefore, the oppressed of other nations desire to find in
America an asylum of permanent freedom, let them come prepared, heart
and hand, and vote against the institution of slavery; for they who
enslave man cannot themselves remain free.
True are the great words of Kossuth: "No nation can remain free with
whom freedom is a _privilege_ and not a principle.
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