those territories choose to establish slavery, and if they come here with constitutions establishing slavery, I am for admitting them with such provisions in their constitutions, but then it will be their own work, and not ours, and their posterity will have to reproach them, and not us, for forming constitutions allowing the institution of slavery to exist among them."
Lewis Cass, in his Nicholson letter, which gave the Wilmot proviso its deathblow, says: "We may well regret the existence of slavery in the Southern States and wish that they had been saved from its introduction." Again, he says, which is particularly worthy of our notice: ' ' Involuntary labor requiring the investment of large capital, can only be profitable when employed in the production of a few favored articles confined by nature to special districts, and paying larger returns than the usual agricultural products spread over more considerable portions of the earth."
James Buchanan, speaking of the compromise of 1850, says: "Neither the soil, the climate, nor the productions of California south of 36 degrees 30 minutes, nor indeed any portion of it, north or south, is adapted to slave labor, and besides, every facility would be there afforded for the slaves to escape from his master, and such property would be entirely insecure in any part of California. It is morally impossible, therefore, that a majority of the emigrants to that territory south of 36 degrees 30 minutes, which will be chiefly composed of our citizens, will ever re-establish slaverj^ in its limits." Would Mr. Buchanan vote for slavery in Oregon? Would he vote for a "moral impossibility?"
Stephen A. Douglas, in a speech delivered in the Senate on the 14th day of February, 1857, says: "I am aware, sir, that the act of Congress was passed prohibiting slavery in Oregon, but it was never passed here until six years after the people of that territory had excluded it by their own law, unanimously adopted. So Oregon was consecrated to freedom by act of their local legislature six years before the Congress of the United States by the Wilmot proviso undertook to do
