Let it not, however, for a moment be inferred, from what I have related, that Horace Mann was ever willing, for any consideration, to abandon the rights of the enslaved to the will of their oppressors, and suffer the dominion of slaveholders to be extended over the whole of our country. Far otherwise. A few years after the arrest of Latimer, Mr. Mann became a member of Congress; and there he uttered some of the boldest words for freedom and humanity ever heard in our Capitol. As he assured his constituents, in convention at Dedham on the 6th November, 1850, “with voice and vote, by expostulation and by remonstrance, by all means in his power, to the full extent of his ability, he resisted the passage of all the laws” proposed in Mr. Clay’s Omnibus Bill, especially the one respecting fugitives from slavery. He emphatically declared that “he regarded the question of human freedom, with all the public and private consequences dependent upon it, both now and in all futurity, as first, foremost, chiefest among all the questions that have been before the government, or are likely to be before it.” But in 1842 Mr. Mann could not foresee, nor be persuaded to apprehend, that the senators and representatives of the Southern States would become audacious enough in 1850 to demand that the people of the free States should do for them the work of slave-catchers and bloodhounds. And he was, at that time, so intent upon his great undertaking for the improvement of our common schools, that he thought it our duty to repress our interest in every other reform that was unpopular. THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. He who knew so well what is in man said: “The children of this world are wiser towards their generation than the children of light.” And certainly the slaveholders of our country and their partisans have been incomparably more vigilant in watching for whatever might affect the stability of their “peculiar institution,” and far more adroit in devising measures, and resolute in pressing them to the maintenance and extension of _Slavery_, than their opponents have been in behalf of _Liberty_.