“We are reproached with doing mischief by the agitation of this question.  The society goes into no household to disturb its domestic tranquillity.  It addresses itself to no slaves to weaken their obligations of obedience.  It seeks to affect no man’s property.  It neither has the power nor the will to affect the property of any one contrary to his consent.  The execution of its scheme would augment instead of diminishing the value of property left behind.  The society, composed of free men, conceals itself only with the free.  Collateral consequences we are not responsible for.  It is not this society which has produced the great moral revolution which the age exhibits.  What would they who thus reproach us have done?  If they would repress all tendencies toward liberty and ultimate emancipation, they must do more than put down the benevolent efforts of this society.  They must go back to the era of our liberty and independence, and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return.  They must renew the slave trade, with all its train of atrocities.  They must suppress the workings of British philanthropy, seeking to meliorate the condition of the unfortunate West Indian slave.  They must arrest the career of South American deliverance from thraldom.  They must blow out the moral lights around us and extinguish that greatest torch of all which America presents to a benighted world—­pointing the way to their rights, their liberties, and their happiness.  And when they have achieved all those purposes their work will be yet incomplete.  They must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the light of reason and the love of liberty.  Then, and not till then, when universal darkness and despair prevail, can you perpetuate slavery and repress all sympathy and all humane and benevolent efforts among free men in behalf of the unhappy portion of our race doomed to bondage.”

The American Colonization Society was organized in 1816.  Mr. Clay, though not its projector, was one of its earliest members; and he died, as for many preceding years he had been, its president.  It was one of the most cherished objects of his direct care and consideration, and the association of his name with it has probably been its very greatest collateral support.  He considered it no demerit in the society that it tended to relieve the slave-holders from the troublesome presence of the free negroes; but this was far from being its whole merit in his estimation.  In the same speech from which we have quoted he says: 

" There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence.  Transplanted in a foreign land, they will carry back to their native soil the rich fruits of religion, civilization, law, and liberty.  May it not be one of the great designs of the Ruler of the universe, whose ways are often inscrutable by short-sighted mortals, thus to transform an original crime into a signal blessing to that most unfortunate portion of the globe?”