'The second objection may be resolved into this; that the Society, under the specious pretext of removing a vicious and noxious population, is secretly undermining the rights of private property. This is the objection expressed in its full force, and if your memorialists could for a moment believe it to be true in point of fact, they would never, _slaveholders as they are_, have associated themselves together for the purpose of co-operating with the Parent Society; and far less would they have appeared in the character in which they now do, before the legislative bodies of a slaveholding State. And, if any instance could be now adduced, in which the Society has ever manifested even an intention to depart from the avowed object, for the promotion of which it was originally instituted, none would with more willingness and readiness withdraw from it their countenance and support. But, from the time of its formation, down to the present period, all its operations have been directed exclusively to the promotion of its one grand object, namely, the colonization in Africa of the free people of color of the United States. It has always protested, and through your memorialists it again protests, that _it has no wish to interfere_ with the delicate but important subject of slavery. It has never, in a solitary instance, addressed itself to the slave. It has never sought to invade the tranquillity of the domestic circle, nor the peace and safety of society.'--[Memorial of the Auxiliary Colonization Society of Powhatan, to the Legislature of Virginia.--Twelfth Annual Report.] 'Therefore she looked, and well might she look, to colonization and to colonization alone. To abolition _she could not look_, and need not look. Whatever that scheme may have done, heretofore, in the States now free, it had done nothing and could do nothing in the slave States for the cause of humanity. This subject he rejoiced to know was now better understood, and all began to see that it was _wiser_ and _safer_ to remove, by colonization, a great and otherwise insuperable impediment to emancipation, _than to act upon the subject of emancipation itself_.'--[Speech of Mr Key.--Thirteenth Annual Report.] 'Our Society has nothing to do directly with the question of slavery.' * * * 'Whilst the Society protests that it has no designs on the rights of the master in the slave--or the property in his slave, which the laws guarantee to him,' &c.--[Speech of Gerrit Smith, Esq.--Fourteenth Annual Report.]