The
discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what?
The manufacturers of the Free States constitute a more numerous class
than the slaveholders of the South: suppose they should claim an equal
sanctity for the Protective System. Discussion is the very life of
free institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral
enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed.
The Swiss guide enjoins silence in the region of avalanches, lest the
mere vibration of the voice should dislodge the ruin clinging by frail
roots of snow. But where is our avalanche to fall? It is to overwhelm
the Union, we are told. The real danger to the Union will come when
the encroachments of the Slave-Power and the concessions of the
Trade-Power shall have made it a burden instead of a blessing. The
real avalanche to be dreaded, are we to expect it from the
ever-gathering mass of ignorant brute force, with the irresponsibility
of animals and the passions of men, which is one of the fatal
necessities of slavery, or from the gradually increasing consciousness
of the non-slaveholding population of the Slave States of the true
cause of their material impoverishment and political inferiority? From
one or the other source its ruinous forces will be fed, but in either
event it is not the Union that will be imperilled, but the privileged
Order who on every occasion of a thwarted whim have menaced its
disruption, and who will then find in it their only safety.
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