investment.  Were the nation one great, pure church, we would sit down and reason of “righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come.”  Had slavery fortified itself in a college, we would load our cannons with cold facts, and wing our arrows with arguments.  But we happen to live in the world,—­the world made up of thought and impulse, of self-conceit and self-interest, of weak men and wicked.  To conquer, we must reach all.  Our object is not to make every man a Christian or a philosopher, but to induce every one to aid in the abolition of slavery.  We expect to accomplish our object long before the nation is made over into saints or elevated into philosophers.  To change public opinion, we use the very tools by which it was formed.  That is, all such as an honest man may touch.

All this I am not only ready to allow, but I should be ashamed to think of the slave, or to look into the face of my fellow-man, if it were otherwise.  It is the only thing which justifies us to our own consciences, and makes us able to say we have done, or at least tried to do, our duty.

So far, however you distrust my philosophy, you will not doubt my statements.  That we have denounced and rebuked with unsparing fidelity will not be denied.  Have we not also addressed ourselves to that other duty, of arguing our question thoroughly?—­of using due discretion and fair sagacity in endeavoring to promote our cause?  Yes, we have.  Every statement we have made has been doubted.  Every principle we have laid down has been denied by overwhelming majorities against us.  No one step has ever been gained but by the most laborious research and the most exhausting argument.  And no question has ever, since Revolutionary days, been so thoroughly investigated or argued here, as that of slavery.  Of that research and that argument, of the whole of it, the old-fashioned, fanatical, crazy Garrisonian antislavery movement has been the author.  From this band of men has proceeded every important argument or idea which has been broached on the antislavery question from 1830 to the present time.  I am well aware of the extent of the claim I make.  I recognize, as fully as any one can, the ability of the new laborers, the eloquence and genius with which they have recommended this cause to the nation, and flashed conviction home on the conscience of the community.  I do not mean, either, to assert that they have in every instance borrowed from our treasury their facts and arguments.  Left to themselves, they would probably have looked up the one and originated the other.  As a matter of fact, however, they have generally made use of the materials collected to their hands. * * * When once brought fully into the struggle, they have found it necessary to adopt the same means, to rely on the same arguments, to hold up the same men and the same measures to public reprobation, with the same bold rebuke and unsparing invective that we have used.  All their conciliatory bearing, their painstaking