Among our citizens who will be long remembered as early and fearless opponents of slavery, leading and acting with energy and independence, according to their personal convictions and occasionally in differing ways, were the venerable Isaac T. Hopper, William Lloyd Garrison, whose life has been so faithfully recorded by his sons, John Greenleaf Whittier, whose old Huguenot spirit lives in his verse as in his name, Ellis Gray Loring, Lovejoy, the martyr of the west, Wendell Phillips, with his matchless eloquence, Theodore D. Weld, with his trenchant pen, Elizur Wright, Jr., Samuel R. Ward, William Goodell, S. S. Jocelyn, Gamaliel Bailey, Jr., Edmund Quincey, S. H. Gay, Oliver Johnston, James S. Gibbons, and others, who opened the way--sometimes by devious and diverging paths--for the party of the Union and Emancipation. As the contest advanced from the field of politics to that of war, came Union men from different points whose names will live in our history with those of John A. Andrew, John C. Fremont, John P. Hale, Chase, Sumner, Seward, Preston and John A. King, Wilmot, Giddings, Wade, Holt, and Edwin D. Stanton. In New York, where mob law had prevailed, the Union League Club upheld the loyalty of the city, the credit of the nation, and the sanitary commission; raised troops for Hancock in addition to its own coloured regiments; stimulated the ardour of our soldiers and the patriotism of the country; welcomed, of the army, Grant and Sherman, Mead and Sheridan, Hancock and Hooker, Warren and Burnside, and of the navy, Farragut, Dupont and Rogers, Winslow and the youthful Cushing; verifying in its spirit and action the remark of Vice-President Colfax that on the Union League Club Lincoln had leaned in the darkest hours. The Club did not forget, neither will the truthful historian forget, that amid the European plots and intrigues in the interest of slavery, we had friends high and low, from Alexander of Russia, the emancipator of twenty millions of serfs--who, like Lincoln, fell by assassination--to the humble peasants, who instinctively recognised the hostility to the rights of labor inherent in the slavery system, whose vicious features had been exposed by John Bright with such masterly effect. Goldwin Smith, the historic scholar of Oxford, who at home had denounced those who would have made England an accomplice in "the creation of a great slave empire, and in its future extension from the grave of Washington to the Halls of Montezuma," in his reply to the greetings of the eminent citizens who had asked him to the club and who assembled to meet him,[B] said, "Your cause is ours; it is the cause of the whole human race." The same idea, in almost the same words, was expressed by the Count de Cavour a few days before his death, in a despatch to the Italian Minister at Washington, when he said "that ours was the cause not only of constitutional liberty, but of all humanity."