Such was the state of things in the United States less than half a century ago. On one side was an enormous pecuniary interest, vast political power, the weight of the press, an almost unanimous public opinion, the necessities of commerce, the authority of fashion, the teachings of nearly every denomination in the Christian church, and the moral obligations attributed to the sacred covenants of the fathers of the Republic. On the other side there were only a few voices crying in the wilderness, "It is unjust to claim property in man." The object of the work before us is to show how, after the slave power had reached this summit of influence, it lost it all in a single generation; how, less by the zeal of its opponents than by the madness of its defenders, this enormous fabric of oppression was undermined and overthrown; and how, in a few years, the insignificant handful of antislavery people brought to their side the great majority of the nation. Certainly a work which should do justice to such a history would be one of the most interesting books ever written. For in this series of events everything was involved which touches most nearly the mind, the conscience, the imagination, and the heart of man. How many radical problems in statesmanship, in political economy, in ethics, in philosophy, in theology, in history, in science, came up for discussion during this long controversy! What pathetic stories of suffering, what separation of families, what tales of torture, what cruelty grown into a custom, what awful depths of misery, came continually to light, as though the judgment-day were beginning to dawn on the dark places of the earth! What romances of adventure, what stories of courage and endurance, of ingenuity in contrivance, of determination of soul, were listened to by breathless audiences as related by the humble lips of the fugitives from bondage! How trite and meagre became all the commonplaces of oratory before the flaming eloquence of these terrible facts! How tame grew all the conventional rhetoric of pulpit and platform, by the side of speech vitalized by the immediate presence of this majestic argument! The book which should reproduce the antislavery history of those thirty years would possess an unimagined charm.