The history of this Association, owing to its objects and achievements, sweep in an interest that is not confined to any class: an interest that is not confined to any people, and whose scope and consequences cannot be foretold by human inspiration. It affects the emancipation of a whole race; and in that it touches the progress and character of all who are brought in contact with that race, the forms of government over the world and the world's progress in all departments. There was a recent time in American history when no man, in all its length and breadth, could read the Declaration of Independence and say that he possessed all of his civil and political liberties. Garrison could not speak in New Orleans, nor could the silver-tongued Phillips address an audience south of Mason and Dixon's line. Nor was it expedient for John C. Calhoun to address his arguments in Independence Hall, or for Davis and Yulee and Mason to propound theirs in Faneuil Hall. Speech was itself in thrall, and bound to the section in which it found voice. When Garrison and Phillips had been invited to speak in Cincinnati, they were counseled by their friends not to do so. There was danger that the mobs of Covington and Cincinnati would assassinate them publicly; and it is notorious that the opposing arguments that reached Washington from the North and from the South advanced no further in either direction. This impugned and belied the very freedom declared in the Declaration and Constitution; and made both the mockery of Europe. The contradiction is reconciled; the taunt is silenced; speech is legally free and protected over all the Union, and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society has done more than any other agency--more than all other agencies combined--to vitalize the Constitution and give being to the Declaration. This society fought for the glowing assertion of all the centuries: That men are born free and equal, and are endowed with inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It kept the contrast between the declaration and its practise in a clear light. It repeated the assertion and reasserted it. It argued the justice with the very facts and reasons that had been presented to the Congress by whom the Declaration was framed. Undisturbed by ridicule, unchecked by hostility, undaunted by persecution, it has kept the law in the van of the fight; sustained it by reserves of humane reason; by appeals to national strength and welfare, and growth, and influence, and wealth; it disseminated the truth in churches, at the polls, in lyceums, by the press; it was unanswerable because its claim was founded in equity, and recognized in religion, and had ineradicable place in the great muniment of national being. It appealed to the individual conscience as well as to pride, patriotism, piety, and interest, and it won, and now celebrates a victory immeasurably greater than that of Yorktown or Waterloo or Marathon.