The insensibility of the people of our country to the wrongs, the outrages, we were directly and indirectly inflicting upon our colored brethren, when Mr. Garrison commenced the antislavery reform,--the insensibility of the Northern people, scarcely less than that of the Southern,--of New England as well as of the Carolinas and Georgia, of the professing Christians, almost as much as of the political partisans,--that insensibility, not yet wholly overpast, even in Massachusetts, is a _moral phenomenon_. A more glaring inconsistency does not appear in the whole history of mankind. The love of liberty was an American passion. We gloried in our Revolution. We thought our fathers were to be honored above all men for throwing off the British yoke. Taxation without representation was not to be submitted to. “Resistance to tyrants was obedience to God.” We regarded the “Declaration of Independence” as the most momentous document ever penned by mortal man, the herald note of deliverance to the race. The first sentence of the second paragraph of it was as familiar to everybody as the Lord’s Prayer; and almost as sacred as that prayer did we hold the words “All men were created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And yet few had given a thought to the fact that there were millions of men, women, and children in our land who were held under a heavier bondage than that to which the Israelites were subjected in the land of Egypt, were denied all the rights of humanity, were herded together like brutes,--bought, sold, worked, whipped like cattle. All in our country who were descendants from the Puritans, especially those of us who claimed descent from the fathers of New England, were imbued with the spirit of _religious_ liberty, had much to say about the rights of conscience; but we gave no heed to the awful fact that there were millions in the land who were not allowed to exercise any of those rights, were not permitted to read the Bible or any other book, and were taught little else about God, but that He was an invisible, ever-present, almighty overseer of the plantations upon which they were worked like cattle, standing ready at all times, everywhere, to inflict upon them, if they neglected their unrequited tasks, a thousand-fold more dreadful punishment than their earthly tormentors were able even to conceive. We Americans, especially we New-Englanders, were, or thought we were, all alive to the cause of human freedom. We were quick to hear the cry of the oppressed, that came to us from distant lands. We stopped not to ask the language, character, or complexion of the sufferers. It was enough for us to know that they were human beings, and that they were deprived of liberty. We hesitated not to denounce their tyrants.