The state of slavery is always a state of war. In its deepest tranquillity, it is but a truce. Active hostilities are liable at any hour to be resumed. Civil war between the north and the south,--any thing that brings the quickening idea of freedom home to the mind of the slave; that supplies him with facilities of escape, or immunities for revenge,--will unleash the bloodhounds of insurrection. Can you muster armies in secret, and march them in secret, so that the slave shall not know that they are mustered and marched to perpetuate his bondage, and to extend the bondage of his race? Was not Major Dade’s whole command supposed to be massacred through the treachery of a slave? A foray within your borders places you in such a relation to the slave that you are helpless without him, and in danger of assassination with him. He that defends slavery by war, wars against the eternal laws of God, and rushes upon the thick bosses of Jehovah’s buckler. Such are some of the “hazards” which the leaders of public opinion at the south, the legislators and guides of men in this dark and perilous hour, are invoking upon themselves and their fellows; not for the interests of the whole, but for the fancied interests of the slaveholders alone, and against the real interest of a vast majority of the people. May God give that wisdom to the followers which he seems not yet to have imparted to the leaders. Sir, in these remarks, I have studiously abstained from every thing that seemed to me like retaliation or unkindness. I certainly have suffered no purposed word of crimination to pass my lips. If I have uttered severe truths, I have not sought for severe language in which to clothe them. What I have said, I have said as to a brother sleeping on the brink of a precipice, where one motion of his troubled sleeping, or of his bewildered awaking, might plunge him into remediless ruin. In conclusion, I have only to add, that such is my solemn and abiding conviction of the character of slavery, that under a full sense of my responsibility to my country and my God, I deliberately say, better disunion,--better a civil or a servile war,--better any thing that God in his providence shall send, than an extension of the bounds of slavery. Upon the close of Mr. Mann’s remarks,