The position in regard to slavery which was taken thirty years ago there is no room to regret. It was taken with perfect sincerity, and under an uncontrollable pressure of conviction. The part performed by the abolitionists was predestined. The conduct of their opponents looks now as irrational as it did then. American slavery was so atrocious a system, so hideous a blot, that no terms were to be kept with it. Probably nothing but the surgeon's knife would have availed in dealing with such a cancerous mass. The cord had become so fatally twisted that the knot, too closely drawn to be untied, must be cut with the sword. The abolition of slavery was inevitable; it came about through a great elemental upheaval. The situation had become intolerable and was past reforming. Long before the war, it had become impossible to get along with the slaveholders, except on the most ignoble principles of trade or fashion. All manly acquiescence was out of the question. The Unitarians, as such, were indifferent or lukewarm; the leading classes were opposed to the agitation. Dr. Channing stood almost alone in lending countenance to the reform, though his hesitation between the dictates of natural feeling and Christian charity towards the masters hampered his action, and rendered him obnoxious to both parties,--the radicals finding fault with him for not going further, the conservatives blaming him because he went so far. The transcendentalists were quite universally abolitionists, for their philosophy pointed directly towards the exaltation of every natural power. Wherever they touched the earth--as they did not always, some of them soaring away beyond terrestrial things--flowers of hope sprang up in their path. In France, Germany, and England, they were friends of intellectual and social progress, of the ideal democracy. The spiritual philosophy was in the air; its ideas were unconsciously absorbed by the enthusiastic spirits. They constituted the life of the period; they were a light to such as dwelt in darkness or sat under the shadow of death.