city. Men will come to their senses. This will add thousands of bold and true friends to our cause. Slavery itself will be burnt out at last.

Oh, what a tale to float on the four winds of Heaven! what an act to be related in the old world!

It would be a proud spectacle to see you draw a draft for a new and nobler hall, while the smoke of the first ascended like that of a mighty furnace to Heaven. Give my most profound and affectionate respects to all your co-workers in this holy enterprise. Be of good courage. The great moral battle is yours. God is with you. The voice of the civilized world is with you. The eyes of angels and men of the upper and this lower world are on you. The eyes of posterity will often moisten as they read the tragic page in which you are the conspicuous actors. But, go on. The slave and the freeman all look to you to build a second hall to Liberty. I feel identified with your new Phoenix temple. They will not burn another. Public sentiment will roll over them.

16 June, 1838, UTICA.

DEAR FRIEND :

I snatch the first moment that my pressing engagements and a journey, in and out, of 1,200 miles, with my wife and daughter, have allowed, to enjoy the satisfaction I now feel, in answering your second and third letters, which have imparted great pleasure to me, my family, and others, who have had the opportunity of listening to their highly interesting contents. There is something so ennobling to find you acquiring fresh strength and new vigor, by the persecutions which lower and thunder over your head and those of your noble coadjutors, that all you have suffered, and we by sympathy with you, seems to be a cheap mode of purchasing the development of those lofty points of character, that unflinching firmness, that holy boldness and unwavering constancy amidst the whirlwind

of human passion and interests. Yes, such remarkable virtues as these can only be known in the hour of a nation's peril-can only be understood at the funeral of Liberty, and only seen at the grave of humanity. The great virtues are not to be used in the days of prosperity, but are to be brought forth for the sustentation of truth and justice in an hour of distress, when the surface-springs and bubbling brooks show us nothing but dusty and forsaken channels.

On that night when the troops of slavery-a northern mob -howled through your streets, instead of sacrificing on the altar raised to liberty and consecrated by us in the temple of free discussion, their first sacrifice being the temple itself to the god of fire and darkness, whose willing subjects they are, how I have rejoiced, in such an hour, to see you, deliberately sketching, by the dying light of the first temple, a second one still more illustrious and beautiful.

I came from Philadelphia home. The next week I went to the Herkimer Circuit and acquitted a woman charged with murder, and successfully defended a breach of promise of marriage case. On Monday, 28th May, I started for Boston, and attended, three days, the New England Convention. A Convention which will do much good in carrying out the permanent quarterly subscriptions, the libraries, the petitioning Congress and the State legislature, in adding to the ranks of members, and, last, though not least, in inducing political action. All these points are to be made practical. Saturday, after Convention adjourned, I addressed the ladies of Boston, and added to the roll of members. Sunday, I addressed the people of Dorchester; Monday, those of Duxbury; and, Tuesday, those of Plymouth Rock, the place of the landing of our forefathers. Wednesday, I went, at urgent solicitation, 104 miles overland to Concord, New Hampshire, where the State Society met on Thursday, and the legislature on same day. On Thursday I spoke three or four hours, and on Friday, our

friends asked the legislature for the State House for me; but I lost it by thirteen votes-115 to 128. Last year, out of 150 members, our friends could get but 15 or 16 to vote for our having the hall.

Gov. Hill yoked temperance and abolition together, and abused both objects shamefully. On Friday, our friends insisted that I should review the opinions of their governor, delivered in his message the day before, and the conduct of the assembly in refusing us the house. I did not spare them, I assure you. Some forty or fifty members present. Saturday, I came some sixty miles to Groton, Mass., delivered an address on Sunday, two on Monday, and on Tuesday, went to Boston by Lowell, forty miles, and spent the day, and in the afternoon and night went to New York-saw the Executive Committee of the Parent Society and talked to them two hours, and got home on Thursday, at three P.M. The thermometer in the shade has been all the time for the last eight days, at from 80 to 90° Fahrenheit.

Be encouraged, dear brother; you are engaged in a mighty work. Do not disturb the ruins of the Hall, if the corporation will let them stand, for the space of five years to come. These burnt and ruined walls will make men think. The nation is fairly waked up. We will make politicians feel so, that they will be the first to run with their buckets to put out our blazing halls. Write, and believe me ever thine.

UTICA, June 26th, 1838.

I thank you most kindly for the box to which you allude and the minerals from Pennsylvania Hall therein contained. We are very thankful that you have any scrap of oak or pine from that Hall, the memory of which will last. That Hall seemed to be too noble and glorious a monument for this age; and, instead of lifting itself as a mark of the tempest

and a target for the thunder-bolt, standing from century to century, a great moral landmark on the coast of time, upbraiding the surrounding churches and public edifices, as unheedful of the cries of bleeding humanity, forcing the world to see that the slaveholder had locked up the northern churches, and public halls, and strutted in bold defiance with these keys hanging from his girdle; instead of standing such conspicuous beacon from age to age, our Hall, when the slaveholders demanded the key, as if conscious of the contamination, blushed into a blaze of indignation, and expired, only to live on the pages of history, being satisfied that she had done more, in the four days of her existence, for the cause of humanity, than all the halls and churches erected in the land.

REPORT OF A SPEECH

DELIVERED BEFORE A

JOINT COMMITTEE OF THE LEGISLATURE OF VERMONT,

Raised to inquire into the propriety of reporting and passing Resolutions addressed to Congress, praying that body to abolish the internal Slave Trade between the States, Slavery in the District of Columbia, and in the Territories of the United States, and to prevent the admission of new Slave States, and Texas into the Union, by special request and invitation from the Vermont State A. S. Society, on the 25th, 26th and 27th of October, 1838.

The resolutions passed the Senate by the following vote: "Yeas, 22; nays, 0." In the Assembly they were carried by acclamation, and no negative was called.

SPEECH.

HONORABLE GENTLEMEN OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE: You are clothed with power for the most exalted purposes; not to inquire into the propriety of a bridge over a river, the suitableness of granting a bank charter in this or that town, of increasing or diminishing the tax on this or that district or county; no, your duty extends to eight times as many people as those who constitute this sovereign and independent State, who are your countrymen, your brethren, your fellow beings, born in the republic, not to its rich inheritance, but its orphanage; not to its glory, but to its dishonor; not to its rich treasure of knowledge and religion, but its utter intellectual bereavement and heathenism; not to its liberty and independence, but its slavery and loss of all things; not to its bright and glorious hope, but its blackness of darkness, in despair. In behalf of two and a half millions of your