who are smitten by the sacred beauty of the great cause, should serve it greatly. Don’t drag the engine, like an ignoramus, but bring wood and water and flame, like an engineer. The AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY has laid the track. “Buy slaves and set them free.” Yes; lop the branches and strengthen the root; make the destruction of the system more difficult by practising upon it; create a demand for the slave breeder to supply; compromise with crime; raise the market price, when you ought to stop the market; put a philanthropic mark upon the slave trade; spend money enough in buying one man to free fifty gratis, and convert a thousand. But there is a _wholesale_ way, cries one. “Sell the public lands, and set every means in motion, from the merely mercantile donation of a million to the infant cent society, and thus raise two thousand millions of dollars, and beg the slaveholders to take it, (not as compensation, but as a token of good will,) and let their bondmen go.” I marvel at this insufficient notion of the heart of a slaveholder. I wonder exceedingly at such a want of imagination. “Not as compensation” is well put; for what sum can compensate a monarch for his throne? This system of slavery makes the south the parent of long lines of princes. It gives to her diabolical dominions “Kingdoms, and sway, and strength, and length of days.” I am strangely divided in sympathy. I feel at once the generosity of the proposal, and have the feeling of contempt with which its insufficient inappropriateness is received. “Organize vigilance committees, and establish underground railroads.” Yes; hide from tyranny, instead of defying it; _whisper_ a testimony; form a bad habit of mind in regard to despotism; try to keep out the sea with a mop, when you ought to build a dike; flatter your sense of compassion by taking private retail measures to have suffering ameliorated, when you might, with the AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, be taking public wholesale measures to have _wrong_ (the cause of suffering) _righted_. You may safely leave with the half and quarter converted, with the slaveholders, nay, even with the Curtises, the charge of all these things, which without the American Anti-Slavery Society are but as hydrogen and nitrogen without oxygen, however good with it, as the natural fruits of its labors. What I would discourage is, not mercy and compassion in an individual case, but a disgraceful mistake in the economy of well doing; spending in salving a sore finger what would buy the elixir vitæ; preferring the less, which _ex_cludes the greater, to the greater, which _in_cludes the less. Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and _that_ can be done only by showing them a higher one. Now, there is _one_ thing that can’t be done in _secret_; you can’t _set a good example under a bushel_.