cheek of mercenary selfishness crimsons
at the thought of his incorruptible integrity! How heartless and hollow
pretenders, who offer lip service to freedom, while they give their hands
to whatever work their slaveholding managers may assign them; who sit in
chains round the crib of governmental patronage, putting on the spaniel,
and putting off the man, and making their whole lives a miserable lie,
shrink back from a contrast with the proud and austere dignity of his
character! What a comment on their own condition is the memory of a man
who could calmly endure the loss of party favor, the reproaches of his
friends, the malignant assaults of his enemies, and the fretting evils of
poverty, in the hope of bequeathing, like the dying testator of Ford,

"A fame by scandal untouched,
To Memory and Time's old daughter, Truth."

The praises which such men are now constrained to bestow upon him are
their own condemnation. Every stone which they pile upon his grave is
written over with the record of their hypocrisy.

We have written rather for the living than the dead. As one of that
proscribed and hunted band of Abolitionists, whose rights were so bravely
defended by William Leggett, we should, indeed, be wanting in ordinary
gratitude not to do honor to his memory; but we have been actuated at the
present time mainly by a hope that the character, the lineaments of which
we have so imperfectly sketched, may awaken a generous emulation in the
hearts of the young democracy of our country. Democracy such as William
Leggett believed and practised, democracy in its full and all-
comprehensive significance, is destined to be the settled political faith
of this republic. Because the despotism of slavery has usurped its name,
and offered the strange incense of human tears and blood on its profaned
altars, shall we, therefore, abandon the only political faith which
coincides with the Gospel of Jesus, and meets the aspirations and wants
of humanity? No. The duty of the present generation in the United
States is to reduce this faith to practice, to make the beautiful ideal a
fact.

"Every American," says Leggett, "who in any way countenances slavery is
derelict to his duty, as a Christian, a patriot, a man; and every one
does countenance and authorize it who suffers any opportunity of
expressing his deep abhorrence of its manifold abominations to pass
unimproved." The whole world has an interest in