The subject of this article is very opportune at the present time.[A] While the roar of the cannon, fired in honor of Mr. Garrison at the moment of his late departure from England, is still reverberating through the land, it will be interesting and instructive to recall the purpose of his mission to that country just thirty-four years ago; and how he was vilified when he went, and denounced, hunted, mobbed, on his return. He went there to undeceive the philanthropists of Great Britain as to a gigantic fraud which had been practised upon them, as well as the antislavery people of the United States. He has gone now to the World’s Antislavery Convention as a delegate from our _National Association_ for the education, and individual, domestic, and civil elevation of our colored population, whose condition thirty years ago, and until a much more recent period, it was confidently maintained, and pretty generally conceded, could not be essentially improved within the borders of our Republic, if, indeed, on the same continent with our _superior Anglo-Saxon race_. The conscience of our country was never at peace concerning the enslavement of the colored people. It was denounced by Jefferson in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, and afterwards in his “Notes on Virginia.” An effort to abolish slavery was made in the Convention that framed our Constitution; and strenuous opposition to that Magna Charta was made in several of the State Conventions called to ratify it, because the abominable wrong was indirectly and covertly sanctioned therein. Soon after we became a nation plans were proposed and associations formed for the improvement of the condition of the colored population; and the General Government was earnestly entreated, in a petition headed by Dr. Franklin, “to go to the utmost limits of its power” to eradicate the great evil from the land. But the doctrine was industriously taught by our statesmen that the status of that class of the people was left, in the Constitution of the Union, to be determined by the government of each of the States in which they may be found. And still greater pains were taken, by those who were bent on the perpetuation of slavery, to make it generally believed throughout the country that negroes were naturally a very inferior race of men; utterly incapable of much mental or moral culture, and better off in domestic servitude on our continent than in their native state in Africa. Notwithstanding this disparagement of them, and the other inducements pressed upon the white people everywhere to acquiesce in their enslavement, many colored persons emancipated themselves, especially in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Louisiana; and many more were set free by the workings of the consciences of their owners, or in gratitude for their services to individuals or the public. Thus, considerable bodies of freedmen were found almost everywhere in the midst of the slaves.