It was true, he said, that Lincoln was not elected as an abolitionist. Lincoln declared, and the Republican party declared, that they stood by the constitution; that they would, so far as the constitution allowed, restrict slavery and prevent its extension to new territory. Yet they knew that the constitution gave them all they desired. "Well did they know, and well did the Southerners know, that any anti-slavery president and congress, by their direct power of legislation, by their control of the public patronage, and by the application of the public moneys, could not only restrict slavery within its present boundaries, but could secure its ultimate abolition. The South perfectly comprehended that Mr. Lincoln, if elected, might keep within the letter of the constitution and yet sap the foundation of the whole slave system, and they acted accordingly."
In answering the question, "Why did not the North let the slave states go in peace?" Brown freely admitted the right of revolution. "The world no longer believes in the divine right of either kings or presidents to govern wrong; but those who seek to change an established government by force of arms assume a fearful responsibility--a responsibility which nothing but the clearest and most intolerable injustice will acquit them for assuming." Here was a rebellion, not to resist injustice but to perpetuate injustice; not to deliver the oppressed from bondage, but to fasten more hopelessly than ever the chains of slavery on four millions of human beings. Why not let the slave states go? Because it would have been wrong, because it would have built up a great slave power that no moral influence could reach, a power that would have overawed the free Northern States, added to its territory, and re-established the slave trade. Had Lincoln permitted the slave states to go, and to form such a power, he would have brought enduring contempt upon his name, and the people of England would have been the first to reproach him.
Brown argued, as he had done in 1852, that Canada could not be indifferent to the question, whether the dominant power of the North American continent should be slave or free. Holding that liberty had better securities under the British than under the American system, he yet believed that the failure of the American experiment would be a calamity and a blow to free institutions all over the world. For years the United States had been the refuge of the oppressed in every land; millions had fled from poverty in Europe to find happiness and prosperity there. From these had been wafted back to Europe new ideas of the rights of the people. With the fall of the United States this impetus to freedom, world-wide in its influence, would cease. Demands for popular rights and free constitutions would be met by the despotic rulers of Europe with the taunt that in the United States free constitutions and popular rights had ended in disruption and anarchy. "Let us not forget that there have been, and still are, very different monarchies in the world from that of our own beloved queen; and assuredly there are not so many free governments on earth that we should hesitate to devise earnestly the success of that one nearest to our own, modelled from our own, and founded by men of our own race. I do most heartily rejoice, for the cause of liberty, that Mr. Lincoln did not patiently acquiesce in the dismemberment of the republic."