at the North, and protected by duties; at the South, cotton was cultivated with profit, and a heavy duty protected the slave-grown sugar of Louisiana. The pecuniary interests of North and South became closely connected, and both seemed dependent on the peaceable continuance of slavery. Little was said against it, little thought, and nothing done. Southern masters voluntarily brought their slaves to New England, and took them back, no one offering the African the conventional shelter of the law, not to speak of the natural shelter of justice. We well remember the complaint made somewhat later, when a Judge decided that a slave, brought here by his master's consent, became, from that moment, free! But where sin abounded, grace doth much more abound. There rose up one man who would not compromise, nor be silent,--who would be heard.[49] He spoke of the evil, spoke of the sin--for all true reforms are bottomed on religion, and while they seem adverse to many interests, yet represent the idea of the Eternal. He found a few others, a very few, and began the anti-slavery movement. The "platform" of the new party was not an interest, but an idea--that "All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Every truth is also a fact; this was a fact of human consciousness, and a truth of necessity. The time has not come to write the history of the abolitionists,--other deeds must come before words; but we cannot forbear quoting the testimony of one witness, as to the state of anti-slavery feeling in New England in 1831. It is the late Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, a former mayor of Boston, who speaks in his recent letter. "The first information received by me, of a disposition to agitate this subject in our State, was from the Governors of Virginia and Georgia, severally remonstrating against an incendiary newspaper, published in Boston, and, as they alleged, thrown broadcast among their plantations, inciting to insurrection and its horrid results. It appeared, on inquiry, that no member of the city government [of Boston] had ever heard of the publication. Some time afterwards it was reported to me by the city officers, that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors. This information.... I communicated to the above-named governors, with an assurance of my belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of our people."