"The senator from Indiana [Mr. Pettit] has made a long argument to-night to prove the inferiority of the African race. Well, sir, I have no contest with the senator upon that question. I do not claim for that race intellectual equality; but I say to the senator from Indiana that I know men of that race who are quite equal in mental power to either the senator from Indiana or myself--men who are scarcely inferior, in that respect, to any senators upon this floor. But, sir, suppose the senator from Indiana succeeds in establishing the inferiority of that despised race, is mental inferiority a valid reason for the perpetual oppression of a race? Is the mental, moral, or physical inferiority of a man a just cause of oppression in republican and Christian America? Sir, is this Democracy? Is it Christianity? Democracy cares for the poor, the lowly, the humble. Democracy demands that the panoply of just and equal laws shall shield and protect the weakest of the sons of men. Sir, these are strange doctrines to hear uttered in the Senate of republican America, whose political institutions are based upon the fundamental idea that 'all men are created equal.' If the African race is inferior, this proud race of ours should educate and elevate it, and not deny to those who belong to it the rights of our common humanity. "The senator from Indiana boasts that his State imposes a fine upon the white man that gives employment to the free black man. I am not surprised at the degradation of the colored people of Indiana, who are compelled to live under such inhuman laws, and oppressed by the public sentiment that enacts and sustains them. I thank God, sir, Massachusetts is not dishonored by such laws! In Massachusetts we have about seven thousand colored people. They have the same rights that we have; they go to our free schools, they enter all the business and professional relations of life, they vote in our elections, and in intelligence and character are scarcely inferior to the citizens of this proud and peerless race whose superiority we have heard so vauntingly proclaimed to-night by the senators from Tennessee and Indiana." Returning home at the close of the session, he warned his personal friends and political associates that the American organization, which had acted with the anti-Nebraska men in the North, was to be seduced by the South, and betrayed by men in the North, who assumed to control its actions. On the 8th of May, he delivered an address before a large assemblage in the Metropolitan Theatre in New York, upon the development of the anti-slavery sentiment in America for twenty years, from 1835 to 1855. On this occasion he declared that: