, extended her republic across a continent. Under her
auspices the vine of liberty took deep root and filled the land; the
hills were covered with its shadow, its boughs were like the goodly
cedars, and reached unto both oceans. The fame of this only daughter of
freedom went out into all the lands of the earth; from her the human
race drew hope.

Neither hereditary monarchy nor hereditary aristocracy planted itself
on our soil; the only hereditary condition that fastened itself upon us
was servitude. Nature works in sincerity, and is ever true to its law.
The bee hives honey; the viper distils poison; the vine stores its
juices, and so do the poppy and the upas. In like manner every thought
and every action ripens its seed, each according to its kind. In the
individual man, and still more in a nation, a just idea gives life, and
progress, and glory; a false conception portends disaster, shame, and
death. A hundred and twenty years ago a West Jersey Quaker wrote: "This
trade of importing slaves is dark gloominess hanging over the land; the
consequences will be grievous to posterity." At the north the growth of
slavery was arrested by natural causes; in the region nearest the
tropics it throve rankly, and worked itself into the organism of the
rising States. Virginia stood between the two, with soil, and climate,
and resources demanding free labor, yet capable of the profitable
employment of the slave. She was the land of great statesmen, and they
saw the danger of her being whelmed under the rising flood in time to
struggle against the delusions of avarice and pride. Ninety-four years
ago the legislature of Virginia addressed the British king, saying that
the trade in slaves was "of great inhumanity," was opposed to the
"security and happiness" of their constituents, "would in time have the
most destructive influence," and "endanger their very existence." And
the king answered them that, "upon pain of his highest displeasure, the
importation of slaves should not be in any respect obstructed."
"Pharisaical Britain," wrote Franklin in behalf of Virginia, "to pride
thyself in setting free a single slave that happened to land on thy
coasts, while thy laws continue a traffic whereby so many hundreds of
thousands are dragged into a slavery that is entailed on their
posterity." "A serious view of this subject," said Patrick Henry in
1773, "gives a gloomy prospect to future times." In the same year
George Mason wrote to the legi