nor of
Missouri, chairman of the Committee on Emancipation, introduced to the
Convention an Ordinance for the final extinction of Slavery! They hunted
another through the streets of a great Northern city in 1835; and within
a few weeks a regiment of colored soldiers, many of them bearing the
marks of the slave-driver's whip on their backs, marched out before
a vast multitude tremulous with newly-stirred sympathies, through the
streets of the same city, to fight our battles in the name of God and
Liberty!

The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles
at their door, are apt to be severe also on what they contemptuously
emphasize as "sentiments" considered as motives of action. It is
charitable to believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly
understand the meaning of the words they use, but rather play with
them, as certain so-called "learned" quadrupeds play with the printed
characters set before them. In all questions involving duty, we act
from sentiments. Religion springs from them, the family order rests upon
them, and in every community each act involving a relation between any
two of its members implies the recognition or the denial of a sentiment.
It is true that men often forget them or act against their bidding in
the keen competition of business and politics. But God has not left
the hard intellect of man to work out its devices without the constant
presence of beings with gentler and purer instincts. The breast of woman
is the ever-rocking cradle of the pure and holy sentiments which will
sooner or later steal their way into the mind of her sterner companion;
which will by and by emerge in the thoughts of the world's teachers, and
at last thunder forth in the edicts of its law-givers and masters.
Woman herself borrows half her tenderness from the sweet influences of
maternity; and childhood, that weeps at the story of suffering, that
shudders at the picture of wrong, brings down its inspiration "from
God, who is our home." To quarrel, then, with the class of minds that
instinctively attack abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to
sneer at the sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous
actions, is merely a display of unthinking levity, or of want of the
natural sensibilities.

With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one
direction, and the awakened conscience of the North stirring in
the other, the open conflict of opinion was inevit