In fact, if we carry ourselves by historical research back to that day, and ascertain men's opinions by authentic records still existing among us, it will be found that there was no great diversity of opinion between the North and the South upon the subject of slavery. The great ground of objection to it then was political; that it weakened the social fabric; that, taking the place of free labor, society was less strong and labor less productive; and both sections, with an exhibition of no little acerbity of temper and violence of language, ascribed the evil to the injurious and aggrandizing policy of Great Britain, by whom it was first entailed upon the Colonies. The terms of reprobation were then more severe in the South than the North. It is a notorious fact that some of our Northern forefathers were then the most aggravated slave dealers. They transported the miserable captives from Africa, sold them at the South, and were well paid for their work; and, when emancipation laws forbade the prolongation of slavery at the North, there are living witnesses who saw the crowds of negroes assembled along the shores of the New England and the Middle States to be shipped to latitudes where their bondage would be perpetual. Their posterity toil to-day in the fields of the Southern planter. It is a remarkable fact, also, that of the slaves imported into the United States during a period of eighteen years, from 1790 to 1808, not less than nine-tenths were imported for and by account of citizens of the Northern States and subjects of Great Britain--imported in Northern and British vessels, by Northern and British men, and delivered to Northern born and British born consignees. The trade was thus carried on, with all its historic inhumanity, by the sires and grandsires of the very men and women, who, for thirty years, have been denouncing slavery as a sin against God, and slaveholders as the vilest class of men and tyrants who ever disgraced a civilised community; and the very wealth in which, in a large degree, these agitators now revel, has descended to them as the fruit of the slave trade in which their fathers grew fat. The following statistics of the port of Charleston, S. C., from the year 1804 to 1808, will more plainly illustrate this remark:--