of society and the growing philanthropy of the age might find to be necessary to the fuller practical development of the great truths of liberty? Was there no way to deal with slavery but to attack the slaveholder as a sinner, stained with the deepest of crimes against God and his fellow-men? Was there nothing to be done to aid him in ridding himself of the burthen of his sin, by discussing with him the economical problems of his situation? Was it necessary for strangers to demand instant and unqualified manumission, regardless of what was to follow? Was it necessary to assail the Constitution as an unholy covenant with sin, and, rejecting its restraints, to disregard the wisdom that takes human nature as it is, that is careful not to provoke reaction, that looks before and after, and shapes its measures with a rational forecast of their adaptation to the end? Whilst it is not to be denied that our “Abolitionists” were men of a certain kind of courage developed into rashness, of unbounded zeal, of singular energy, of persistent consistency with their own principles of action, and of that fanatical force which is derived from the incessant contemplation of one idea to the exclusion of all others, it must nevertheless be said that they were not statesmen. There was no one among them of whom it can be said that he acted with a statesmanlike comprehension of the difficulties of this great subject, or with a statesman’s regard for the limitations on individual conduct. Their situation was very different from that of the public or private men in England, who gallantly led the early crusade against the slave trade, or of those who afterwards brought about emancipation in the British colonies. Whatever Parliament thought fit to do in regard to slavery under the British flag or in the British dominions, it had ample power to do, and what Parliament might be made to do, was for the nation to determine. An English statesman or philanthropist had, in either character, no constitutional restraints to consider. He had to deal with both moral and economical questions, and he could deal freely with either. He could use argument, persuasion, invective, or denunciation, and he could not be told by the Jamaica slaveholder, you have entered into a solemn public compact with me which secures to me the exclusive cognizance of this domestic relation, and by that compact you purchased the very existence of the general government under which we both live. But a citizen of the United States, or a foreigner, taking his stand in a free State, stirring up popular hatred of the slaveholder, sending into the Southern States publications which were there regarded as incendiary, persuading legislative bodies in the North to act against one of the express conditions of the Federal Union, and renouncing all Christian fellowship with Southern churches, surely violated the spirit and in some respects the letter of the Constitution. He