How many more could be brought! opinions of great and good men of the North, acknowledging and maintaining the rights of the people of the South.  Everett, Adams, Cambreleng, and a host of others, whose names I need not give.  “Time was,” said Mr. Fletcher in Boston, (in 1835, at a great meeting in that city,) “when such sentiments and such language would not have been breathed in this community.  And here, on this hallowed spot, of all places on earth, should they be met and rebuked.  Time was, when the British Parliament having declared ’that they had a right to bind us in all cases whatsoever,’ and were attempting to bind our infant limbs in fetters, when a voice of resistance and notes of defiance had gone forth from this hall, then, when Massachusetts, standing for her liberty and life, was alone breasting the whole power of Britain, the generous and gallant Southerners came to our aid, and our fathers refused not to hold communion with slaveholders.  When the blood of our citizens, shed by a British soldiery, had stained our streets and flowed upon the heights that surround us, and sunk into the earth upon the plains of Lexington and Concord, then when he, whose name can never be pronounced by American lips without the strongest emotion of gratitude and love to every American heart,—­when he, that slaveholder, (pointing to a full-length portrait of Washington,) who, from this canvass, smiles upon his children with paternal benignity, came with other slaveholders to drive the British myrmidons from this city, and in this hall our fathers did not refuse to hold communion with them.

“With slaveholders they formed the confederation, neither asking nor receiving any right to interfere in their domestic relations:  with them, they made the Declaration of Independence.”

To England, not to the United States, belongs whatever odium may be attached to the introduction of slavery into our country.  Our fathers abolished the slave-trade, but permitted the continuation of domestic slavery.

Slavery, authorized by God, permitted by Jesus Christ, sanctioned by the apostles, maintained by good men of all ages, is still existing in a portion of our beloved country.  How long it will continue, or whether it will ever cease, the Almighty Ruler of the universe can alone determine.

I do not intend to give a history of Abolition.  Born in fanaticism, nurtured in violence and disorder, it exists too.  Turning aside the institutions and commands of God, treading under foot the love of country, despising the laws of nature and the nation, it is dead to every feeling of patriotism and brotherly kindness; full of strife and pride, strewing the path of the slave with thorns and of the master with difficulties, accomplishing nothing good, forever creating disturbance.

The negroes are still slaves—­“while the American slaveholders, collectively and individually, ask no favours of any man or race that treads the earth.  In none of the attributes of men, mental or physical, do they acknowledge or fear superiority elsewhere.  They stand in the broadest light of the knowledge, civilization, and improvement of the age, as much favored of Heaven as any other of the sons of Adam.”