Mr. Garrison addressed the Convention, and was listened to with respectful attention. I need not say that he spoke in a manner worthy of the place and the occasion, and in perfect consistency with his avowed principles. The chief business done by the Convention was the issuing of an elaborate, carefully prepared Address to the people of the United States, setting forth the reasons why Texas should not be annexed to our Republic, and why we ought not to submit to such a violation of the Constitution of our Union, and such an outrage upon the territory and institutions of an adjoining nation. Mr. Garrison published the document in his _Liberator_ of the next week and said, “The Address of the Convention was, as a whole, a most forcible and eloquent document, worthy to be read of all men, and to be preserved to the latest posterity. It was adopted unanimously, after a disclaimer by Samuel J. May and myself of that portion of it which seeks to vindicate the United States Constitution from the charge of guaranteeing protection to slavery.” I was irresistibly impelled to ask that that part of the otherwise admirable Address might be omitted, because it would obliterate the most momentous lesson taught in the history of our nation,--namely, that the reluctant, indirect, inferential consent given by the framers of our Republic to the continuance of slavery in the land--not any deliberate explicit guaranty--had countenanced and sustained the friends of that “System of Iniquity,” from generation to generation, in violating the inalienable rights of millions of our fellow-beings, and had brought upon us, who are opposed to that system, the evils of political discord, national disgrace, and the fear of national disruption and ruin. I urged the Convention to acknowledge distinctly that, “under the commonly received interpretation of the Constitution, we have hitherto been giving our countenance and support to the slaveholders in their outrages upon humanity, the fundamental rights of man,--an iniquity of which we will no longer be guilty. We have been roused from our insensibility to the wrongs we have wickedly consented should be inflicted upon others--”the least of the brethren“--by the discovery of the evils we have thereby brought upon ourselves, and the ruin that awaits our nation if we do not stay the iniquity where it is, and commence at once the work “meet for the repentance” that alone can save us,--the extermination of slavery from our borders.” “Let this Convention declare, that we certainly will not consent to the extension of slavery,--no, not an inch. And if they urge to its consummation the annexation of Texas, in the way they propose, they will, by so doing, trample the Constitution under foot, set at naught some of its most important provisions, grossly violate the compact of our United States, and therefore absolve us from all obligations to respect it or live under it any longer.”