men, under the guidance of an unseen hand, have become the stout advocates of the Christian principles of brotherhood and of duty to carry a Gospel to every Creature. * * * * This advocacy of righteousness toward man, and of the rights of man as man, has become so much a matter of course with us that we are likely to overlook its vast significance. Even on our Puritan soil it was not from the beginning so. The “austere morality and democratic spirit of the Puritans” even did not keep them clear of sin of human bondage. “Their experience of Indian ferocity and treachery, acting on their theologic convictions, led them early and readily to the belief that these savages, and, by logical inference, all savages, were the children of the devil, to be subjugated, if not extirpated, as the Philistine inhabitants of Canaan had been by the Israelites under Joshua. Indian slavery, sometimes forbidden by law, but usually tolerated, if not entirely approved, by public opinion, was among the early usages of New England; and from this to negro slavery—the slavery of any variety of pagan barbarians—was an easy transition.” But at the time of the Declaration of Independence public sentiment had already greatly changed. In the original draft of this document there was a specific indictment of George III., which was prophetic of the “furnace blast” beneath which the nation for a hundred subsequent years was to “wait the pangs of transformation” into a man-loving, mission-promoting people. Mr. Jefferson, in the draft of the immortal Declaration, reflected the public thought and feeling so closely that he has been accused by many of plagiarism. We seem thus early to find the pre-intimations of a nation in its public acts ranging itself on the side of a vast scheme of Providence. The indictment referred to is as follows: “Determined to keep an open market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the _liberties_ with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.” Mr. Jefferson, in his “Works,” says: “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia;” and he adds, “our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for, though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” It is as impossible, at present, as it is needless to proceed from this initial point through discussions for the formation of platforms and parties,