and collected from sources so various, have
seldom been found in juxtaposition. They remain at this day a silent
witness of a most singular tide of feeling which at that time swept over
the British community, and _made_ for itself an expression, even at the
risk of offending the sensibilities of an equal and powerful nation.

No reply to that address, in any such tangible and monumental form, has
ever been possible. It was impossible to canvass our vast territories
with the zealous and indefatigable industry with which England was
canvassed for signatures. In America, those possessed of the spirit
which led to this efficient action had no leisure for it. All their time
and energies were already absorbed in direct efforts to remove the great
evil concerning which the minds of their English sisters had been newly
aroused, and their only answer was the silent continuance of these
efforts.

From the Slaveholding States, however, as was to be expected, came a
flood of indignant recrimination and rebuke. No one act, perhaps, ever
produced more frantic irritation or called out more unsparing abuse.
It came with the whole united weight of the British aristocracy and
commonalty on the most diseased and sensitive part of our national life;
and it stimulated that fierce excitement which was working before and
has worked since till it has broken out into open war.

The time has come, however, when such an astonishing page has been
turned in the anti-slavery history of America, that the women of our
country, feeling that the great anti-slavery work to which their English
sisters exhorted them is almost done, may properly and naturally feel
moved to reply to their appeal, and lay before them the history of what
has occurred since the receipt of their affectionate and Christian
address.

Your address reached us just as a great moral conflict was coming to its
intensest point.

The agitation kept up by the anti-slavery portion of America, by
England, and by the general sentiment of humanity in Europe, had made
the situation of the slaveholding aristocracy intolerable. As one of
them at the time expressed it, they felt themselves under the ban of the
civilized world. Two courses only were open to them: to abandon slave
institutions, the sources of their wealth and political power, or to
assert them with such an overwhelming national force as to compel the
respect and assent of mankind. They chose the latter.

To this end they de