To complete, _by moral and religious means and instruments_, the great work which the American revolutionists commenced; to do what they left undone; to exterminate from our land the worst form of oppression, the tremendous sin of slavery, was the sole purpose of the enterprise of the Abolitionists, commenced in January, 1831. In this great work Mr. Garrison has been the leader from the beginning. Of him, therefore, I shall have the most to say. But of many other noble men and women I shall have occasion to make most grateful mention. Although I claim that Mr. Garrison has done more than any one else for the liberation of the immense slave population of America, I am not ignorant or forgetful of those who, before his day, made some attempts for their deliverance. Not to mention the many eminent divines and statesmen of England and the Colonies, before the Revolution, who utterly condemned slavery,--the prominent leaders in that momentous conflict with Great Britain, and in the institution of our Republic, felt and acknowledged its glaring inconsistency with a democratic government. Some of that day predicted, with almost prophetic foresight, the evils, the ruin, which it would bring upon our nation, if slavery should be permitted to abide in our midst. Many protested against the Constitution, because of those articles in it which favored the continuance and indefinite extension of “the great iniquity.” But their objections were too generally overruled by plausible expositions of the potency of other parts of our Magna Charta; and they acquiesced, in the vain hope that the _spirit_ of the Constitution would prove to be better than the letter. For twenty years after the re-formation of our General Government in 1787, true-hearted men and women spoke and wrote in terms of strong condemnation of slavery, as well as the slave-trade. They spoke and wrote and published what the spirit of liberty dictated, in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, not less than in Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England States. Nay, more, they instituted “societies for the amelioration of the condition of the enslaved, and their _gradual_ emancipation.” Headed by no less a man than Dr. Franklin, they besieged Congress with petitions for the suppression of the African slave-trade, and the _gradual_ abolition of slavery. But after, in 1808, they had obtained the prohibition of the trade, they subsided, as did the abolitionists of Great Britain, into the belief that the subversion of the whole evil of slavery would soon follow as a consequence; not foreseeing that, so long as the _market_ for slaves should be kept open, the commodity demanded there would be forthcoming, let the hazard of procuring it be ever so great. It is now notorious that the traffic in human beings has never been carried on so briskly as since its nominal abolition, while the sufferings of the victims, and the destruction of their lives, have been threefold greater than before.