title; but he loved the name too well not to make it stand for some
practical fact, some feasible and organized effort. He believed that our
National Constitution did, indeed, hold many compromises with Slavery,
but was framed, in the majority of its provisions and certainly in the
totality of its spirit, in the interests of freedom; and that it only
needed enforcement by the choice of the ballot-box to bring the South
either to an amicable or a hostile settlement of the question. Which, he
did not ask or care. The duty of the present could not be mis-read; it
was written in _the vote_.

With these views, he gave much time and work to organizing in this
State, "The National Liberty Party," in 1840, and to securing from
Pennsylvania some of the seven thousand votes that were cast for John G.
Birney in that year throughout the Union. By the time another election
came, the party had swelled its numbers to seventy thousand. To
contribute his share towards this success, tract after tract, address
after address, were written and sent broadcast; meetings were convened,
committees formed, resolutions framed, speeches made, petitions and
remonstrances sent, public action fearlessly sifted and criticised; in
short, because he held a steady faith in men's humane promptings when
ultimately reached, he 'cried aloud' to them by every access, and
'spared not' to call them from their timidity and time-serving to manly
utterance through the ballot-box.

Of such appeals, his address of the "Liberty Party of Pennsylvania, to
the people of the State," issued in 1844, may stand as a sample. It is a
vivid portrayal of the slave power's insidious encroachments, and of its
monopolized guidance of the Government. It gathers up the national
statistics into groups, shows how new meaning is reflected from them
thus related, that all unite to illustrate the single fact of the
South's steady increase of power, her tightening grasp about the throat
of government, and her buffets of threat to the North when a weedling
palm failed to palsy fast enough. It warns northern voters of the
undertow that is drawing them, and adjures them, by every consideration
of political common sense, not to cast their ballots for either of the
pro-slavery candidates presented. The conclusion of this address is as
follows:

OUR OBJECT.

"And now, fellow-citizens, you may ask, what is our object in
thus exhibiting to you the alarming influence of the sl