"Perhaps you expect the slaveholding class will abate its pretensions, and practise voluntarily the moderation which you wish, but dare not demand at its hands. How long, and with what success, have you waited already for that reformation? Did any property class ever so reform itself? Did the patricians in old Rome, the noblesse or the clergy of France? The landholders in Ireland? The landed aristocracy in England? Does the slaveholding class even seek to beguile you with such a hope? Has it not become rapacious, arrogant, defiant? Is it not waging civil war against Freedom, wherever it encounters real resistance? No! no! you have let the lion and the spotted leopard into the sheep-fold. They certainly will not die of hunger there, nor retire from disgust with satiety. They will remain there so long as renewed appetite shall find multiplied prey. Be not self-deceived. Whenever a property class of any kind is invited by society to oppress, it will continue to oppress. Whenever a slaveholding class finds the non-slaveholding classes yielding, it will continue its work of subjugation. "You admit all this, and you ask how are these great evils, now so apparent, to be corrected--these great dangers, now so manifest, to be avoided. I answer, it is to be done, not as some of you have supposed, by heated debates sustained by rifles or revolvers at Washington, nor yet by sending armies with supplies and Sharpe's rifles into Kansas. I condemn no necessary exercise of the right of self-defence, anywhere. Public safety is necessary to the practice of the real duties of champions of Freedom. But this is a contest in which the race is not to the physically swift, nor the battle to those who have most muscular strength. Least of all is it to be won by retaliation and revenge. The victory will be to those who shall practise the highest moral courage, with simple fidelity to the principles of humanity and justice. Notwithstanding all the heroism of your champions in Washington and Kansas, the contest will be fearfully endangered, if the slaveholding class shall win the President and the Congress in this great national canvass. Even although every one of these champions should perish in his proper field, yet the Rights of Man will be saved, and the tide of oppression will be rolled back from our northern plains, if a President and a Congress shall be chosen who are true to freedom. The people and the people only are sovereign and irresistible, whether they will the ascendency of slavery or the triumph of liberty.