John G. Whittier, Esq., speaking for the Quakers of New England, gives “a peremptory denial” to Mr. Webster’s statement. I quote the following paragraph from him:-- “Now, we undertake to say that there is not a member of the Society of Friends, in free or slave states, who, whether acting as a magistrate or as citizen, could carry out the provisions of this most atrocious bill, without rendering himself liable to immediate expulsion from a society whose character would be disgraced, and whose discipline would be violated, by such action. It has been, in times past, the misfortune of the Society of Friends to be vilified, caricatured, and misrepresented; but we remember nothing, even in the old days of persecution, so hard to bear as the compliments of the Massachusetts senator. Whatever his ‘authority’ may have been, we do not hesitate to pronounce it unqualifiedly false to the last degree.” Now what shall be thought of a cause that requires such a series of fabrications as Mr. Webster is here proved to have made, or of the man that can make it! There are many other points presented by Mr. Webster’s speech of the 7th of March, or by what he has since said and written to defend it, which seem to me as unwarrantable in fact, and as reprehensible in principle, as any above enumerated. I shall close these notes, however, with one comment more; reserving others,--though sincerely hoping never to have occasion to use them. Among the excoriations with which Mr. Webster amused himself and his southern new-born pro-slavery admirers, on the 7th of March last, he flayed nobody half so deeply or so complacently, as he did his old fellow-senators, Messrs. Dix, of New York, and Niles, of Connecticut. He scored them to the living flesh, and then soothed their smarting wounds by vitriol and caustic, as though he loved them. Their agency in the Texas swindle, he made odiously conspicuous. He taunted them with heart-piercing innuendo for their compulsory retirement from public life. And then he portrayed them as occupying their enforced vacation in attempting to rouse the people to save those regions from the curse of slavery, which, but for their sins, never would have been exposed to it. He worked up the scene so graphically, that every one mocked at their contemptible plight, and at the ridiculous contrast between the swiftness of their offence and the lameness of their expiation. The effect was dramatic. The pro-slavery part of the gallery and the floor responded with a shout of laughter. Yet devoted and long-tried friends of Mr. Webster were there, whom no darkness of blindness could prevent from seeing that his bitter sarcasm against the ex-senators, though calculated to make the “unskilful laugh,” must make the “judicious grieve.” They could not fail to see that he, Mr. Webster himself, at that very moment, was occupying precisely the same pro-slavery ground, which Messrs. Dix and Niles had occupied, when