and that in many cases, they have not only done nothing themselves, but by example and precept have condemned the activity of others; I trust, however, a brighter day in regard to their labors is approaching.  I feel disinclined to take leave of Henry Clay, without some animadversions which, on the public character of a public man, I may offer without any breach of propriety.  In early life, that is in some part of the last century, he supported measures tending to the “eradication of slavery” in Kentucky, and at various periods since, he has indulged in cheap declamation against slavery, though he is not known to have committed himself by a solitary act of manumission.  On the contrary, having commenced life with a single slave, he has industriously increased the number to upwards of seventy.  As a statesman, his conduct on this question has been consistently pro-slavery.  He indefatigably negotiated for the recovery of fugitive slaves from Canada, when Secretary of State, though without success.  In the Senate he successfully carried through the admission of Missouri into the Union, as a slave State.  He has resisted a late promising movement in Kentucky in favor of emancipation; and lastly, in one of his most elaborate speeches, made just before the late presidential election, the proceedings of the abolitionists were reviewed and condemned, and he utterly renounced all sympathy with their object.  By way of apology for his early indiscretion, he observes, “but if I had been then, or were now, a citizen of any of the planting States—­the southern or southwestern States—­I should have opposed, and would continue to oppose, any scheme whatever of emancipation, gradual or immediate.”

In this extract, and throughout the whole speech, slavery is treated as a pecuniary question, and the grand argument against abolition, is the loss of property that would ensue.  Joseph John Gurney, who appears to have been favorably impressed by Henry Clay’s professions of liberality, his courteous bearing, and consummate address, manifested a laudable anxiety that so influential a statesman should be better informed on the point on which he seemed so much in the dark; he therefore addressed to him his excellent “Letters on the West Indies,” of which the great argument is, that emancipation has been followed by great prosperity to the planters, and attended with abundant blessings, temporal and spiritual, to the other classes, and that the same course would necessarily be followed by the same results in the United States.  He has accumulated proof upon proof of his conclusions supplied by personal and extensive investigation in the British Colonies.  But Henry Clay shews no sign of conviction.  Yet though he made to us the absurd remark, already quoted, on Joseph John Gurney’s work, I have too high an opinion of his understanding to think him the victim of his own sophistry.  He is a lawyer and a statesman.  He is accustomed to weigh evidence, and to discriminate facts.  I have little