lan's clouds.
Everybody will join us in denouncing slavery, in the abstract; not a
faithless priest nor politician will oppose us; abandon action, and
forsooth we can have an abolition millennium; the wolf shall lie down
with the lamb, while slavery in practice clanks, in derision, its three
millions of unbroken chains. Our opponents have no fear of the harmless
spectre of an abstract idea. They dread it only when it puts on the
flesh and sinews of a practical reality, and lifts its right arm in the
strength which God giveth to do as well as theorize.

As honest men, then, we must needs act; let us do so as becomes men
engaged in a great and solemn cause. Not by processions and idle parades
and spasmodic enthusiasms, by shallow tricks and shows and artifices, can
a cause like ours be carried onward. Leave these to parties contending
for office, as the "spoils of victory." We need no disguises, nor false
pretences, nor subterfuges; enough for us to present before our fellow-
countrymen the holy truths of freedom, in their unadorned and native
beauty. Dark as the present may seem, let us remember with hearty
confidence that truth and right are destined to triumph. Let us blot out
the word "discouragement" from the anti-slavery vocabulary. Let the
enemies of freedom be discouraged; let the advocates of oppression
despair; but let those who grapple with wrong and falsehood, in the name
of God and in the power of His truth, take courage. Slavery must die.
The Lord hath spoken it. The vials of His hot displeasure, like those
which chastised the nations in the Apocalyptic vision, are smoking even
now, above its "habitations of cruelty." It can no longer be borne with
by Heaven. Universal humanity cries out against it. Let us work, then,
to hasten its downfall, doing whatsoever our hands find to do, "with all
our might."

October, 1843.

DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. (1843.)

THE great leader of American Democracy, Thomas Jefferson, was an
ultra-abolitionist in theory, while from youth to age a slave-holder in
practice. With a zeal which never abated, with a warmth which the frost
of years could not chill, he urged the great truths, that each man should
be the guardian of his own weal; that one man should never have absolute
control over another. He maintained the entire equality of the race, the
inherent right of self-ownership, the equal claim of all to a fair
participation in the enactment of the laws by wh