performing but a simple act of justice to the non-slavo holding whites, upon whom the institution of slavery has weighed scarcely less heavily than upon the negroes themselves. You will also be applying a saving balm to your own outraged hearts and consciences, and your children--yourselves in fact-freed from the accursed stain of slavery, will become respectable, useful, and honorable members of society.

And now, Sirs, we have thus laid down our ultimatum. What are you going to do about it? Something dreadful, as a matter of course! Perhaps you will dissolve the Union again. Do it, if you dare! Our motto, and we would have you to understand it, is the abolition of slavery, and the perpetuation of the American Union. If, by any means, you do succeed in your treasonable attempts to take the South out of the Union to-day, we will bring her back tomorrow-if she goes away with you, she will return with

out you.

Do not mistake the meaning of the last clause of the last sentence; we could elucidate it so thoroughly that no intelligent person could fail to comprehend it; but, for reasons which may hereafter appear, we forego the task.

Henceforth there are other interests to be consulted in the South, aside from the interests of negroes and slaveholders. A profound sense of duty incites us to make the greatest possible efforts for the abolition of slavery; an equally profound sense of duty calls for a continuation of those efforts until the very last foe to freedom shall have been utterly vanquished. To the summons of the righte ous monitor within, we shall endeavor to prove faithful;

nc opportunity for inflicting a mortal wound in the side of slavery shall be permitted to pass us unimproved. Thus, terror-engenderers of the South, have we fully and frankly defined our position; we have no modifications to propose, no compromises to offer, nothing to retract Frown, Sirs, fret, foam, prepare your weapons, threat, strike, shoot, stab, bring on civil war, dissolve the Union, nay annihilate the solar system if you will-do all this, more, less, better, worse, anything-do what you will, Sirs, you can neither foil nor intimidate us; our purpose is as firmly fixed as the eternal pillars of Heaven; we have determined to abolish slavery, and, so help us God, abclish it we will! Take this to bed with you to-night, Sirs. and think about it, dream over it, and let us know how you feel to n.orrow morning.

CHAPTER III.

SOUTHERN TESTIMONY AGAINST SLAVERY.

If it please the reader, let him forget all that we hav› written on the subject of slavery; if it accord with his inclination, let him ignore all that we may write hereaf ter. We seek not to give currency to our peculiar opinions; our greatest ambition, in these pages, is to popular. ize the sayings and admonitions of wiser and better men. Miracles, we believe, are no longer wrought in this bedeviled world; but if, by any conceivable or possible supernatural event, the great Founders of the Republic, Washington, Jefferson, Henry, and others, could be reinvested. with corporeal life, and returned to the South, there is scarcely a slaveholder between the Potomac and the mouth of the Mississippi, that would not burn to pounce upon them with bludgeons, bowie-knives and pistols ! Yes, without adding another word, Washington would be mobbed for what he has already said. Were Jefferson now employed as a professor in a Southern college, he would be dismissed and driven from the State, perhaps murdered before he reached the border. If Patrick Henry were a bookseller in Alabama, though it might be demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that he had never bought,

sold, received, or presented, any kind of literature except Bibles and Testaments, he would first be subjected to the ignominy of a coat of tar and feathers, and then limited to the option of unceremonious expatriation or death. How seemingly impossible are these statements, and yet how true! Where do we stand? What is our faith? Are we a flock without a shepherd? a people without a prophet? a nation without a government?

Has the past, with all its glittering monuments of genius and patriotism, furnished no beacon by which we may direct our footsteps in the future? If we but prove true to ourselves, and worthy of our ancestry, we have nothing to fear; our Revolutionary sires have devised and bequeathed to us an almost perfect national policy. Let us cherish, and defend, and build upon, the fundamental principles of that polity, and we shall most assuredly reap the golden fruits of unparalleled power, virtue and prosperity. Heaven forbid that a desperate faction of slaveholding criminals should succeed in their infamous endeavors to quench the spirit of liberty, which our forefathers infused into those two sacred charts of our politi cal faith, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States. Oligarchal politicians are alone responsible for the continuance of African slavery in the South. For purposes of self-aggrandizement, they have kept learning and civilization from the people; they have wilfully misinterpreted the national compacts, and have outraged their own consciences by declaring to their illiterate constituents, that the Founders of the Republic were not abolitionists. When the dark clouds of slavery,

error and ignorance shall have passed away,--and we believe the time is near at hand when they are to be dissi pated, the freemen of the South, like those of other sec tions, will learn the glorious truth, that inflexible opposi tion to Human Bondage has formed one of the distin guishing characteristics of every really good or great man that our country has produced.

The principles, aims and objects that actuated the framers of the Constitution, are most graphicallly and eloquently set forth, in the following extract from a speech recently delivered by the Hon. A. H. Cragin, of New Hampshire, in the House of Representatives:

"When our forefathers reared the magnificent structure of a free Republic in this Western land, they laid its foundations broad and deep in the eternal principles of right. Its materials were all quarried from the mountain of truth; and, as it rose majestically before an astonished world, it rejoiced the hearts and hopes of mankind. Tyrants only cursed the workmen and their workmanship. Its architecture was new. It had no model in Grecian or Koman history. It seemed a paragon, let down from Heaven to inspire the hopes of men, and to demonstrate the favor of God to the people of a new world. The builders recognized the rights of human nature as universal. Liberty, the great first right of man, they claimed for 'all men,' and claimed it from 'God himself.' Upon this foundation they erected the temple, and dedicated it to Liberty, Humanity, Justice, and Equality. Washington was crowned its patron saint."

"The work completed was the noblest effort of human wisdom. But it was not perfect. It had one blemish-a little spot-the black stain of slavery. The workmen―the friends of freedom everywhere-deplored this. They labored long and prayerfully to remove this deformity. They applied all the skill of their art; but they labored in vain. Self-interest was too strong for patriotism an love of liberty. The work stood still. and for