slave-holding senator, Henry Clay. Hence also the
suspicious compliments of the late President Van Buren, the first act of
whose administration was a pledge to refuse his signature to any bill
for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. I fear it is
undeniable that in the last eight years the collective influence of the
Society has been thrown into the pro-slavery scale, and this
notwithstanding the existence of much diffused and passive sympathy and
right feeling on behalf of the slave, in the breasts of probably a large
majority of individual members. The abolitionists of the United States
have been treated by too many influential Friends, as well as by the
leading professors of other denominations, as a party whose contact is
contamination; yet to a bystander it is plainly obvious that the true
grounds of offence are not always those ostensibly alleged, but the
activity, zeal, and success with which they have cleared themselves of
participation in other men's sins, and by which they have condemned the
passive acquiescence of a society making a high profession of
anti-slavery principles. I do not intend to defend all the proceedings
of the anti-slavery societies. That they have sometimes erred in
judgment and action,--that they have had unworthy men among their
members, I have little doubt. But, the same objections might have been
raised to the old anti-slavery societies, in which the leading Friends
of the United States took an active part with their neighbors of other
denominations, and, with far greater force against the Colonization
Society, which is patronized, even to this day, both by individual
members and by at least one Meeting of Sufferings.[A] The causes that
have produced the state of things I have attempted to describe, derive
their origin, I believe, from one source--inaction. After the Society of
Friends had purified itself from slave-holding, it gradually subsided
into a state of rest, and finally lapsed into lethargy and indifference
on this question. In the world we live in, evil is the quick and
spontaneous growth, while good is the forced and difficult culture. Good
principles can only be preserved bright, pure, and efficient, by
watchful care and constant use; if laid aside, they rust and perish.
These are the necessary effects of the fall of man by disobedience from
that state of happiness and holiness in which he was formed by a
beneficent Creator. In a state of inaction, Friends h