Its practical importance at this moment gives to it additional eminence. Whether measured by the number of beings it seeks to benefit, by the magnitude of the wrongs it hopes to relieve, by the difficulties with which it is beset, by the political relations which it affects, or by the ability and character it enlists, the cause of the slave now assumes proportions of grandeur which dwarf all other interests in our broad country. In its presence the machinations of politicians, the aspirations of office-seekers, and the subterfuges of party, all sink below even their ordinary insignificance. For myself, Sir, I see among us at this time little else by which an honest man, wishing to leave the world better than he found it, can be tempted out upon the exposed steeps of public life. I see little else which can afford any of those satisfactions an honest man should covet. Nor is there any cause so surely promising final success:-- “Oh! a fair cause stands firm and will abide; Legions of angels fight upon her side!”[18] It is written that in the last days there shall be scoffers, and even this Enterprise, thus philanthropic, does not escape their aspersions. As the objections to its Necessity were twofold, and the objections to its Practicability twofold, so also are the aspersions twofold,--_first_, in the form of hard words, and, _secondly_, by personal disparagement of those engaged in it. * * * * * 1. The _hard words_ are manifold as the passions and prejudices of men; but they generally end in the imputation of “fanaticism.” In such a cause I am willing to be called “fanatic,” or what you will; I care not for aspersions, nor shall I shrink before hard words, either here or elsewhere. They do not hurt. “My dear Doctor,” said Johnson to Goldsmith, “what harm does it do any man to call him Holofernes?” From that great Englishman, Oliver Cromwell, I have learned that one cannot be trusted “who is afraid of a paper pellet”; and I am too familiar with history not to know that every movement for reform, in Church or State, every endeavor for Human Liberty or Human Rights, has been thus assailed. I do not forget with what facility and frequency hard words are employed: how that grandest character of many generations, the precursor of our own Washington, without whose example our Republic might have failed, the great William, Prince of Orange, founder of the Dutch Republic, the United States of Holland,--I do not forget how he was publicly branded as “a perjurer and a pest of society”; and, not to dwell on general instances, how the enterprise for the abolition of the slave-trade was characterized on the floor of Parliament, by one eminent speaker as “mischievous,” and by another as “visionary and delusive”; and how the exalted characters which it enlisted were arraigned by still another eminent speaker,--none other than that Tarleton, so conspicuous as commander of the British horse