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Show 318 LIBERTY AND SLAVERY. human passion, if we should suppose that it is merely for the abstract glory of setting up a man of straw, and then knocking it down, that he has mustered all the powers of his logic and unfurled all the splendors of his rhetoric. He has a design in all this, which we shall now proceed to expose. liere arc two distinct questions. First, Is slavery a national institution? Secondly, lias Congress the power to pass a Fugitive Slave Law? These two questions are, wo repeat, perfectly distinrt; and hence, if Mr. Sumner wished to discuss them fairly and honestly, he should have argued each one by itself. We agree 'rith him in regard to the first; we dis• ent toto ca:lo from him in regard to the last. But he has not chosen to keep them separate, or to discuss each one by itself. On the contrary, he has, as we have seen, connected them together as premiss and conclusion, and he k eeps them together through the fit·st portion of his speech. Most assuredly Mr. Sumner knows that one of the very best ways in the world to cause a truth or proposition to be rejected is to bind it up with a manifest enor ot· ~tbsurdity. Yet the proposition for which we contend-that Congress has the power to •upport Tll E FUGITIVE S J.A VE LAW. 319 slavery by the passage of a Fugitive Slave Law -is bound up by him with the monstrous absurdity that" slavery is a national institution;" and both are denounced together as if both were equally absurd. One instance, out of many, of this unfair mode of proceeding, we shall now lay before our readers. "The Constitution contains no power," says he, "to make a king or to support kingly rule. With similar reason it may be said that it contains no power to make a slave, or to support a system of slavery. The absence of all such power is hardly more clear in one case than in the other. But, if there be no such power, all national legislation upholding slavery must be unconstitutional and void." Thus coYct-tly, and in company with the supposed power of Congress to make slaves or to institute slavery, Mt-. Sumner denounces the power of Congress to enact a Fugitive Slave Law! lie not only denounces it, but treats it as absw·d in the extreme; j nst as absurd, indeed, as it would be to assert that Congress had power "to support k-ingly rule !" We can listen to the arguments of Mr. Sumnet· ; but we cannot accept his mere opinion as authority that the powel' of Cong1·ess to enact snrh a law is so |