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"They were listening to me from a distance, as it were and I might have made them hear if you had not come home and thrown them back into the old pleasant groove of non-action and non-belief. In a week you had swept away all I had builded in six months." He spoke with simple conviction and not a trace of the bitterness that might have been in the arraignment.
If it be true that the less one hurries the better the work resulting, then it might seem that by sitting still and merely twirling one's thumbs one would arrive at the very greatest activity and efficiency! Says that humorous old sage, Lao-tze, whom I have already quoted: "By non-action there is nothing that cannot be done."
The President, as he expressed himself, could not, in the then condition of affairs, afford to have a controversy with Sumner, but he so managed as to check violent and aggressive demands by quietly interposing delay and non-action.
Excuses for non-action there were, of course, the perplexities of the situation, the irritation of criticism from without, but Nature has no use for excuses. If there is a cancer in the system it is useless to plead the expense of the surgery or the pain of the knife. The alternative is simple removal or death.
Nor must mention be omitted of the astounding phenomenon that, encouraged by President Buchanan's doctrine of non-coercion and purpose of non-action, a central cabal of Southern senators and representatives issued from Washington, on December 14, their public proclamation of the duty of secession; their executive committee using one of the rooms of the Capitol building itself as the headquarters of the conspiracy and rebellion they were appointed to lead and direct.
At this period the Governor held a consultation with distinguished political leaders, consisting of the Secretary, Andrew Oliver, who had been Stamp-Officer, the Judge of Admiralty, Robert Auchmuty, who was an eminent lawyer, and the Chief Justice, Hutchinson, who was counted the ablest man of the party, all ultra Loyalists, to consider the future policy as to arrests, all doubtless feeling that the non-action course needed explanation.
At the moment the fishing on the Oregon side is practically closed, while there is no limit on the Washington side of any kind, and no one can tell what the courts will decide as to the very statutes under which this action and non-action result.
Under the decision of the Supreme Court the South would demand protection for slavery in the Territories. If he understood the Senator from Illinois, Mr. Douglas, he thought a Territorial Legislature might by non-action or by unfriendly action rightfully exclude slavery.
The Supreme Court has decided that we have a right to carry our slaves into the Territories and, necessarily, to have them protected after we get there. * I neither want to cheat nor to be cheated in the great contest that is to come off in 1860. * I think I understand the position of the Senator from Illinois and I dissent from it. * He thinks that a territorial legislature may, by non-action or unfriendly action, rightfully exclude slavery.
Any other protection would be a delusion and a cheat. If the territorial legislature refused such protection, he for one would demand it of Congress. He dissented altogether from the doctrine of the Senator from Illinois, that by non-action, or unfriendly legislation a Territory could annul a decision of the Supreme Court and exclude slavery. That was mistaking power for right.
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