circumstance, be a witness against a white man. Hang that fact up before the nation and the world. Add to it, that by the slave code no marriage can be binding between a slave and his wife, but may be dissolved at any moment by the arbitrary will of the master. Then, again, the parent has no authority over the child, to train or govern him according to the law of God. Hang that up to view. Go on, now, and make a full synopsis of these laws. You will find, however, that they have made provisions for hanging the man who shall murder a slave. Now, then, let the committee summon all the clerks of the counties throughout the slave region, to bring their records, and certify whether there has ever been a single instance of a master being hanged for the murder of a slave. Yet, in North Carolina, not long since, two white men were hung for merely coaxing a slave away from his master. And, I suppose, a single sheet would contain a list of all the cases on record, of punishments inflicted on masters for cruelties or injuries inflicted on their slaves.

4. Next, I would have the committee of Congress call up ten experienced planters from each of the slave States, to testify what is the political economy of slavery. I would require them to state, as honest men, whether the question has not been often discussed among them, which is the most profitable, to work slaves to death in five years, when cotton is fourteen cents per pound, or to work them twenty years, with cotton at ten cents. Inquire of them whether one-third of the plantation slaves are not let out to tenants, whose only interest is to get out of those poor creatures the greatest possible amount of labor, with the least possible expense for subsistence and comfort. And yet we have men among us, who have rolled through the South in the public conveyances, and seen the well-fed servants at the hotels, and who tell you they know all about slavery, for they have been there, and the slaves are the happiest class of beings in the world.

5. Next, I would send for some men of a class that I believe it is Patrick Henry describes, as the feculum of creation, the scrapings of humanity-the slave drivers, northern men, who have sold themselves, body and soul, to carry on this dreadful business in the detail. I would interrogate them as to the various modes of subduing a refractory spirit, of finding out whether a slave is sick or feigns sickness, and all the various expedients of cruelty, by which an overseer tries to build up the reputation of a great labor-getter.

6. Let our Congressional committee then send for a hundred free men from the slave States, who have never owned a slave themselves, nor their relations, and let them tell what they know about the cruelties and the pollutions incident to the system of slavery.

7. Then I would send for a hundred free colored men, who should be allowed for the first time, under the security of the strong arm of the nation, to testify of their wrongs. Let each one tell how often and by what hair-breadth escapes he has avoided being kidnapped into slavery. Let him turn to that law which allows the magistrate to exile a free colored man from his country, on ten days' notice, unheard, untried, without cause, without compensation, as passion or caprice may dictate, with confiscation of his estate; and if he refuses to go, to be sold as a slave, and his children after him forever.

8. Then I would have them call for a hundred of the ten thousand fugitive slaves, that have found a refuge in Canada, under the government of a hereditary monarch, from the tender mercies of our republican institutions. Let them tell of hopes crushed and hearts broken, of what they endured in slavery, and of the sufferings and anxieties through which they have passed while in the pursuit of liberty.

9. Then I would have brought up before the committee a hundred slaves from the cotton-fields and the sugar-houses,

who should give ocular demonstration of what slavery is. I would have them freed, and protected by a strong force, and they should show their persons abused, their limbs mutilated, their brands and gashes, their backs cut from their shoulders to the heels with republican stripes.

When the committee have gathered all the information in their power, let it be embodied in a report. It would make a volume of a thousand pages. Then send that report through the land. Let the mails burst and the stages groan with the mighty load, telling the naked truth on this subject, in an official and authentic form;-and I tell you, slavery never lifts its abominable head again. All that the nation wants is to have a case once made out to their conviction, that slavery is what Abolitionists charge it tɔ be, and our work is done.

This mountain of iniquity would then stand before every honest mind in all its dreadful prominence. The people, horror-struck, would cry out against it. The foundations of the great deep of crime, as yet unfathomed, would be broken up. As yet who hath believed our report, as Abolitionists? But this would be moral demonstration. It would be taken on the oath of the people of the dark and sullen regions of slavery. Yes, with this report, the nation would pronounce their everlasting condemnation and overthrow of slavery, and all would FREE.

SPEECH ON THE GREAT ISSUES

BETWEEN RIGHT AND WRONG.

DELIVERED AT PENNSYLVANIA HALL, MAY 16, 1838,

Before several Thousand People.

AMEN, and amnen, have been shouted from the throats of the unthinking millions of this earth, as the mandates of tyranny were proclaimed, as the edicts of inhumanity were published to the world; while the lamentations of the oppressed have ascended night and day, as swift witnesses before the living God. These loud outcries of the injured against unavenged cruelty, have created epochs in the march of ages. At different periods of the world, there have been great issues formed between right and wrong, liberty and slavery, and on the determination of those issues have depended the stability or overthrow of empires, the rising and falling of nations.

The pages of history, divine or profane, are the recorded evidence, arguments, and facts of each generation as they have been summoned to share in the creation and decision of those issues. When the issue has been correctly framed, crime, ashamed of her own frightful progeny, has called in falsehood, with her open mouth, to deceive the weak and the thoughtless.

Truth has been insulted and clamored down by the roar of numbers, who have interrupted her narrative or insulted her for the humility of her dress, or derided her for want of those high-born relations which, in the shape of impudence,

interest, superstition, obstinacy, and love of power, have confederated to impeach her, by sneering at the simplicity of her statements, by undervaluing the force of her arguments, while they have sung praises to the highest notes of Falsehood, sworn its deformity was beauty, and the harsh grindings in the prison-house of its oppression were the symphonies of sympathizing humanity; yea, more, they chanted praises of honor and glory to its deductions, and sung anthems to its sophistries, and cried amen to its conclusions.

Honest error has often been a powerful antagonist of truth, and the only enemy whom truth assailed with compassion, and before whom truth had reason to tremble. For when sincerity, one of the darling attributes of truth itself, varnishes error, the judges of the issue sometimes mistake the armor of Achilles for the mighty form which it was made to protect.

What is right or what is wrong? Where are the boundaries that separate?

How far human arrangements can change the abstract wrong into an expedient right, or the abstract right, if asserted, into a wrong, are mighty questions, settled in the early ages of the world, and thousands of times since; but they now seem to come forward as fresh questions, demanding a decision with all the eagerness of zeal, with all that gives weight to high pretension, and with an impatience that forbids delay, from the magnitude of the interests involved; so that our minds are compelled to become moral scales, to re-weigh and re-mark the mighty interests of humanity.

But these questions have been weighed and considered by Him who cannot err, who is the author of right, the enemy of wrong. His weights and measures are the enduring revelations of perfect wisdom. The delivered opinions of the Eternal came down to this world, while men were contending in the forum of philosophical definitions, groping in the