As to the resolution, I approve it entirely.  Its sentiment and its spirit are my own. [Cheers.] At the close of the revolutionary war, which separated the colonies from the mother country, every state of the Union was a slaveholding state; every colony was a slaveholding colony; and now we have seventeen free states. [Cheers.] Slavery has been abolished in one half of the original colonies, and it was declared that there should be neither slavery nor the slave trade in any territory north and west of the Ohio River; so that all that part is entirely free from actual active participation in this curse, laying open a free territory that, I think, must be ten times larger in extent than Great Britain. [Loud cheers.] The State of Massachusetts was the first in which slavery ceased.  How did it cease?  By an enactment of the legislature?  Not at all.  They did not feel there was any necessity for such an enactment.  The Bill of Rights declared, that all men were born free, and that they had an equal right to the pursuit of happiness and the acquisition of property.  In contradiction to that, there were slaves in every part of Massachusetts; and some philanthropic individual advised a slave to bring into court an action for wages against his master during all his time of servitude.  The action was brought, and the court decided that the negro was entitled to wages during the whole period. [Cheers.] That put an end to slavery in Massachusetts, and that decision ought to have put an end to slavery in all states of the Union, because the law applied to all.  They abolished slavery in all the Northern States—­in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island; and it was expected that the whole of the states would follow the example.  When I was a child, I never heard a lisp in defence of slavery. [Hear, hear, hear!] Every body condemned it; all looked upon it as a great curse, and all regarded it as a temporary evil, which would soon melt away before the advancing light of truth. [Hear, hear!] But still there was great injustice done to those who had been slaves.  Every body regarded the colored race as a degraded race; they were looked upon as inferior; they were not upon terms of social equality.  The only thing approaching it was, that the colored children attended the schools with the white children, and took their places on the same forms; but in all other respects they were excluded from the common advantages and privileges of society.  In the places of worship they were seated by themselves; and that difference always existed till these discussions came up, and they began to feel mortified at their situation; and hence, wherever they could, they had worship by themselves, and began to build places of worship for themselves; and now you will scarcely find a colored person occupying a seat in our places of worship.  This stain still remains, and it is but a type of the feeling that has been generated by slavery.  This ought to be known and understood, and this is just one of the out-croppings of that inward feeling that still is doing great injustice to the colored race; but there are symptoms of even that giving way.