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WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1855
of her worst population, and it is time that a more cautious policy should be adopted. There are honorable exceptions, but the mass is a vile compound of all the dangerous tendencies of trans- Atlantic society. The South found herself powerless to check the evil, and it gave way. I could not do it, and whether I am to stand alone, or not, I will always be found resisting the en- croachments of foreign influence upon our government. My vote shall never be found in favor of allowing the vote of the foreigner, who has been on our soil but six months, to weigh against the vote of a native or a naturalized citizen, in moulding the institu- tions of a sovereign State of this Union. Never! Southern men are expected to embrace the Nebraska Bill be- cause it proclaims a correct principle and establishes the doctrine of non-intervention. I accept no guide for my action but the Constitution and my constituents. Because the entire South was wrong, should I be wrong too? I saw in that bill what the results have proved to be in it-disruption and disunion. I told them that generations yet unborn would reap the direful consequences if they repealed the Compromise. What is the establishment of an empty principle, if nothing is to be gained by it? What does the South gain by having the right to carry slaves to Nebraska, if slavery cannot go there? Nothing. The affirmation of a cor- rect principle, when evil will grow out of it, is worse than noth- ing; and can any one point out the benefits which have accrued to the South by this means? Under the Missouri Compromise the South did realize benefits, by the accession of slave States; but now that there is no line between slavery and free soil, where will it end? Population, with anti-slavery tendencies, will make free States at your very doors. You can point to no compact by which the limits of free soil were fixed, and Texas will be like Kentucky, with a receptacle for her runaway negroes on her borders. True, the Missouri Compromise did not compel States south of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes to be slave States, but have any free States been found south of that line? And has it not always been conceded that they were to be slave States? The standard of free soil was not planted in Louisiana or Missouri; and why? Because the Missouri Compromise was a line of de- markation between slavery and free soil, and the North, aggres- sive as it has been, never has crossed that line. Who can foretell the result of the Compromise of 1850? I stood side by side with the statesmen North and South, in the support of those measure8.
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