'
* * * * *
Sir, it was but the other day that we were forbidden, (properly
forbidden I am sure, for the prohibition came from you,) to assume that
there existed any intention to impose a prospective restraint on
the domestic legislation of Missouri--a restraint to act upon it
contemporaneously with its origin as a State, and to continue adhesive
to it through all the stages of its political existence. We are now,
however, permitted to know that it is determined by a sort of political
surgery to amputate one of the limbs of its local sovereignty, and thus
mangled and disparaged, and thus only, to receive it into the bosom of
the Constitution. It is now avowed that, while Maine is to be ushered
into the Union with every possible demonstration of studious reverence
on our part, and on hers, with colors flying, and all the other graceful
accompaniments of honorable triumph, this ill-conditioned upstart of the
West, this obscure foundling of a wilderness that was but yesterday
the hunting-ground of the savage, is to find her way into the American
family as she can, with an humiliating badge of remediless inferiority
patched upon her garments, with the mark of recent, qualified
manumission upon her, or rather with a brand upon her forehead to tell
the stogy of her territorial vassalage, and to perpetuate the memory of
her evil propensities.
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