and brought them to Connecticut to be made into wooden-ware and ax-helves and rake-handles, and carried them right back to sell to the men whose axes had cut down the trees.  The South manufactured nothing except slaves.  It was a great manufacture, that; and the whole market of the North was bribed.  The harness-makers, the wagon-makers, the clock-makers, makers of all manner of implements, of all manner of goods, every manufactory, every loom as it clanked in the North said, “Maintain,” not slavery, but the “compromises of the Constitution.”  The Constitution—­that was the veil under which all these cries were continually uttered.

The distinction between the Anti-slavery men and Abolitionists was simply this:  The Abolitionists disclaimed the obligation to maintain this government and the compromises of the Constitution, and the Anti-slavery men recognized the binding obligation and sought the emancipation of slaves by the more circuitous and gradual influence; but Abolitionism covered both terms.  It was regarded, however, throughout the North as a greater sin than slavery itself, and none of you that are under thirty years of age can form any adequate conception of the public sentiment and feeling during the days of my young manhood.  A man that was known to be an Abolitionist had better be known to have the plague.  Every door was shut to him.  If he was born under circumstances that admitted him to the best society, he was the black sheep of the family.  If he aspired by fidelity, industry, and genius, to good society, he was debarred.  “An Abolitionist” was enough to put the mark of Cain upon any young man that arose in my early day, and until I was forty years of age.  It was punishable to preach on the subject of liberty.  It was enough to expel a man from Church communion, if he insisted on praying in the prayer-meeting for the liberation of the slaves.  The Church was dumb in the North, not in the West.  The great publishing societies that were sustained by the contributions of the Churches were absolutely dumb.

“WHO IS THIS FELLOW?”

It was at the beginning of this Egyptian era in America that the young aristocrat of Boston appeared.  His blood came through the best colonial families.  He was an aristocrat by descent and by nature; a noble one, but a thorough aristocrat.  All his life and power assumed that guise.  He was noble; he was full of kindness to inferiors; he was willing to be, and do, and suffer for them; but he was never of them, nor equaled himself to them.  He was always above them, and his gifts of love were always the gifts of a prince to his subjects.  All his life long he resented every attack on his person and on his honor, as a noble aristocrat would.  When they poured the filth of their imaginations upon him, he cared no more for it than the eagle cares what the fly is thinking about him away down under the cloud.  All the miserable traffickers, and all the scribblers, and all the aristocratic boobies of Boston were no