the silent but powerful change
wrought, by time and chance, upon its composition and temper? When the
fountains of the great deep of abomination were broken up, even the poor
slaves did not escape the general deluge. The French Revolution has
polluted even them. * * *

Men, dead to the operation of moral causes, have taken away from the
poor slave his habit of loyalty and obedience to his master, which
lightened his servitude by a double operation; beguiling his own cares
and disarming his master's suspicions and severity; and now, like true
empirics in politics, you are called upon to trust to the mere physical
strength of the fetter which holds him in bondage. You have deprived him
of all moral restraint; you have tempted him to eat of the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, just enough to perfect him in wickedness; you have
opened his eyes to his nakedness; you have armed his nature against the
hand that has fed, that has clothed him, that has cherished him in
sickness; that hand which before he became a pupil of your school, he
had been accustomed to press with respectful affection. You have done
all this--and then show him the gibbet and the wheel, as incentives to a
sullen, repugnant obedience. God forbid, sir, that the Southern States
should ever see an enemy on their shores, with these infernal principles
of French fraternity in the van. While talking of taking Canada, some of
us are shuddering for our own safety at home. I speak from facts, when I
say, that the night-bell never tolls for fire in Richmond, that the
mother does not hug her infant more closely to her bosom. I have been a
witness of some of the alarms in the capital of Virginia. * * *

Against whom are these charges brought? Against men, who in the war of
the Revolution were in the councils of the nation, or fighting the
battles of your country. And by whom are they made? By runaways chiefly
from the British dominions, since the breaking out of the French
troubles. It is insufferable. It cannot be borne. It must and ought,
with severity, to be put down in this House; and out of it to meet the
lie direct. We have no fellow-feeling for the suffering and oppressed
Spaniards! Yet even them we do not reprobate. Strange! that we should
have no objection to any other people or government, civilized or
savage, in the whole world! The great autocrat of all the Russias
receives the homage of our high consideration. The Dey of Algiers and
his divan of pirates ar