Hoover says he had been offered $1400 for the two slaves mentioned in the indictment, and had refused the offer. Their services were probably worth to him a dollar a day each. One of them was employed in driving a cart about the city. As he saw a handful of money paid to his master every week, or every month, for his own earnings, think you he never asked himself, why that money could not be his? When three out of every four colored men whom he met, from day to day, were receiving their own earnings, and making those earnings minister to their comforts and their pleasures, might not Hoover’s slaves have said, “Why are not our earnings our own? and, if we cannot possess them here, why should we not go to a country where the laborer is deemed, in the language of Scripture, to be worthy of his hire?” and so have fled of their own accord? for, though we are prone to apply the precepts of the gospel to others rather than to ourselves, yet this is a passage which they would be likely to take home. But this is not all, gentlemen. In this capital of a nation so boastful of its freedom, the common air is vocal with the accents of liberty. Many of the colored people can read. Who knows but some of them have read the Declaration of American Independence; and, _in their blindness and simplicity of mind_, applied its immortal truths to themselves? “All men are created equal!” and among their “inalienable rights” “are life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness!” Who knows but that they may have seen these doctrines, with a constellation of names subscribed to them as glorious as any that ever shone in history’s firmament? If such ideas once got possession of a man’s mind, do you think that fire or water could ever burn them or drown them out? Those who cannot read, can hear; and if you are to keep from them the perpetually recurring sights and sounds which must awaken the quick instincts of liberty, you must extinguish their eyes, and seal up their ears in everlasting silence. The last spring was one of peculiar “refreshing” to the ardent lovers of liberty. The recent events of Europe were the theme of every tongue. Not only in the market-place, in the street, and in after-dinner conversations, was the emancipation of Europe the subject of discussion, but stormy eloquence rushed forth from the capital of the nation, like winds from the cave of Æolus, and roared and raved till all but the dead must have heard it. Nay, more, gentlemen, one of the witnesses identified the day when the defendant’s schooner, the Pearl, came to anchor in the waters of this city, because he remembered it as the day of the “torchlight procession.” And what was the “torchlight procession”? You all know;--drums beating, music playing, bonfires blazing, the house of the President and of high official dignitaries illuminated, the trees of the avenue fancifully lighted up with many-colored lanterns; men, women, children, and slaves, all out,