All history, ancient and modern, is full of warning on this point. Need I refer to the many revolts of the Roman and Grecian slaves, the bloody insurrection of Etruria, the horrible servile wars of Sicily and Capua? Or, to come down to later times, to France in the fourteenth century, Germany in the sixteenth, to Malta in the last? Need I call to mind the untold horrors of St. Domingo, when that island, under the curse of its servile war, glowed redly in the view of earth and heaven,--an open hell? Have our own peculiar warnings gone by unheeded,--the frequent slave insurrections of the South? One horrible tragedy, gentlemen, must still be fresh in your recollection,--Southampton, with its fired dwellings and ghastly dead! Southampton, with its dreadful associations, of the death struggle with the insurgents, the groans of the tortured negroes, the lamentations of the surviving whites over woman in her innocence and beauty, and childhood, and hoary age! "The hour of emancipation," said Thomas Jefferson, "is advancing in the march of time. It will come. If not brought on by the generous energy of our own minds, it will come by the bloody process of St. Domingo!" To the just and prophetic language of your own great statesman I have but a few words to add. They shall be those of truth and soberness. We regard the slave system in your section of the country as a great evil, moral and political,--an evil which, if left to itself for even a few years longer, will give the entire South into the hands of the blacks. The terms of the national compact compel us to consider more than two millions of our fellow-beings as your property; not, indeed, morally, really, de facto, but still legally your property! We acknowledge that you have a power derived from the United States Constitution to hold this "property," but we deny that you have any moral right to take advantage of that power. For truth will not allow us to admit that any human law or compact can make void or put aside the ordinance of the living God and the eternal laws of Nature. We therefore hold it to be the duty of the people of the slave-holding states to begin the work of emancipation now; that any delay must be dangerous to themselves in time and eternity, and full of injustice to their slaves and to their brethren of the free states. Because the slave has never forfeited his right to freedom, and the continuance of his servitude is a continuance of robbery; and because, in the event of a servile war, the people of the free states would be called upon to take a part in its unutterable horrors.