come what it _should_ be,--free, happy, prosperous, and
respected by all the world. Then we could say, truthfully, that she
is the home of the free, the land of the brave, the asylum of the
oppressed."

In the same debate, Mr. Maxson, of Allegheny, said:--"All laws,
whether Constitutions or statutes, that invade human rights, are
null. A community has no more power to strike down the rights of man
by Constitutions, than by any other means. Do those who give us
awfully solemn lessons about the inviolability of compacts, mean
that one man is bound to rob another because he has _agreed_ to? In
this age of schools, of churches and of Bibles, do they mean to
teach us that an agreement to rob men of their rights, in whatever
solemn form that agreement may be written out, is binding? Has the
morality of the nineteenth century culminated in _this_, that a mere
compact can convert vice into virtue? These advocates of the
rightfulness of robbery, because it has been _agreed_, to, and that
agreement has been _written down_, have come too late upon the
stage, by more than two hundred years. Where does the proud Empire
State wish to be recorded in that great history, which is being so
rapidly filled out with the records of this "irrepressible
conflict"? For myself, a humble citizen of the State, I ask no
prouder record for her than that, in the year 1860, she enacted that
_the moment a man sets foot on her soil, he is free, against the
world_!"

Wendell Phillips, one of earth's bravest and best, made a speech at
Worcester, 1851, from which I make the following extract:--"Mr.
Mann, Mr. Giddings, and other leaders of the Free Soil party, are
ready to go to the death against the Fugitive Slave Law. It never
should be enforced, they say. It robs men of the jury trial, it robs
them of _habeas corpus_, and forty other things. This is a very good
position. But how much comfort would it have been to Ellen Crafts,
if she had been sent back to Macon, to know that it had been done
with a scrupulous observance of all the forms of _habeas corpus_ and
jury trial? When she got back, some excellent friend might have said
to her, 'My dear Ellen, you had the blessed privilege of _habeas
corpus_ and jury trial. What are you grieving about? You were sent
back according to law and the Constitution. What could you want
more?' From the statements of our Free Soil friends, you would
suppose that the _habeas corpus_ was the great safeguard of a
slave's