Probably no period in the history of the country has been more characterized by the spirit of reform and innovation than that embraced between the years 1825 and 1830. It then seemed as if all the social, moral and religious influences of the community had been gathered in a focus that was destined to annihilate the wickedness of man. Missionary enterprises, though in their youth, were full of vigor. Anniversaries were the occasion of an almost crazy excitement; religion assumed the shape of fanaticism; the churches were thrilled with the sudden idea that the millennium was at hand--the "evangelization of the world" never was blessed with fairer prospects--the "awakenings to grace" were on the most tremendous scale. Peace societies were formed--temperance societies flourished more than ever--Free Masonry was attacked, socially and politically--the Sabbath mail question became one of the absorbing topics of the day--theatres, lotteries, the treatment of the "poor Indian" by the general government--all came under the most rigorous religious review--the Colonization Society, established in 1816, enlarged its operations, and, in short, the spirit of reform became epidemic, and the period one of unprecedented moral and political inquiry. It was a period, too, when in many of the States of the South, and especially those upon the Northern border, the subject was freely discussed of a gradual and healthy emancipation of the slaves, and various plans for this object were presented and entertained. The most valuable agencies were set at work--not by abolitionists, but by Southerners themselves, in whose hearts there had sprung up an embryo reformatory principle simultaneously with the landing upon their shores of the first slaves of their Northern brethren; which would have gone on increasing and fructifying had not the bitterest of denunciation been launched against them and driven the assaulted into an attitude of self-defence, whose defiant spirit now speaks out to the assailant in a bold justification of the institution attacked, as natural and necessary, and which it shall be their purpose to perpetuate forever. As early as 1816 a manumission society was formed in Tennessee, whose object was the gradual emancipation of the slaves under a system of healthy and judicious State legislation. At a later day, Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky were the theatres of discussion on the same subject, and in all of them the question was agitated, socially and politically, with a freedom and liberty that indicated a general desire to effect the philanthropic object.