If the decalogue could be observed in this
casuistical manner, we might be grievous sinners, and yet be liable to
no reproach. We might persist in all our habitual irregularities,
and still be spotless. We might, for example, continue to covet our
neighbors' goods, provided they were the same neighbors whose goods we
had before coveted--and so of all the other commandments.
Will the gentlemen tell us that it is the quantity of slaves, not the
quality of slavery, which takes from a government the republican
form? Will they tell us (for they have not yet told us) that there are
constitutional grounds (to say nothing of common sense) upon which the
slavery which now exists in Missouri may be reconciled with a republican
form of government, while any addition to the number of its slaves (the
quality of slavery remaining the same) from the other States, will
be repugnant to that form, and metamorphose it into some nondescript
government disowned by the Constitution? They cannot have recourse to
the treaty of 1803 for such a distinction, since independently of what I
have before observed on that head, the gentlemen have contended that the
treaty has nothing to do with the matter.
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