slavery is a curse, and an increasing one. That it has been destructive to the lives of our citizens, history, with unerring truth, will record. That its future increase will create commotion, cannot be doubted."

Mr. Summers, of Kanawha, member of the Legislature of Virginia, in 1832, said :

"The evils of this system cannot be enumerated. It were unnecessary to attempt it. They glare upon us at every step. When the owner looks to his wasted estate, he knows and feels them."

THE VOICE OF PRESTON.

In the Legislature of Virginia, in 1832, Mr. Preston said:

"Sir, Mr. Jefferson, whose hand drew the preamble to the Bill of Rights, has eloquently remarked that we had invoked for ourselves the benefit of a principle which we had denied to others. He saw and felt that slaves, as men, were embraced within this principle."

THE VOICE OF FREMONT.

John Charles Fremont, one of the noblest sons of the South, says:

"I heartily concur in all movements which have for their object to repair the mischiefs arising from the violation of good faith in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. I am opposed to slavery in the abstract, and upon principles sustained and made habitual by long settled convictions. I am inflexibly opposed to its extension on this continent beyond its present limits."

"The great body of non-slaveholding Freemen, including those of the South, upon whose welfare slavery is an oppression, will

discover that the power of the General Government over the Public Lands may be beneficially exerted to advance their interests, and secure their independence; knowing this, their suffrages will not be wanting to maintain that authority in the Union, which is absolutely essential to the maintenance of their own liberties, and which has more than once indicated the purpose of disposing of the Public Lands in such a way as would make every settler upon them a freeholder."

In an Address to the Republicans of Maryland, in 1856, Francis P. Blair says:

"In every aspect in which slavery among us can be considered, it is pregnant with difficulty. Its continuance in the States in which it has taken root has resulted in the monopoly of the soil, to a great extent, in the hands of the slaveholders, and the entire control of all departments of the State Government; and yet a majority of people in the slave States are not slave-owners. This produces an anomaly in the principle of our free institutions, which threatens in time to bring into subjugation to slave-owners the great body of the free white population."

THE VOICE OF MAURY.

Lieut. Maury, to whom has been awarded so much wellmerited praise in the world of science, says :

"The fact must be obvious to the far-reaching minds of our Statesmen, that unless some means of relief be devised, some channel afforded, by which the South can, when the time comes, get rid of the excess of her slave population, she will be ultimately found with regard to this institution, in the predicament of the man with the wolf by the ears; too dangerous to hold on any longer, and equally dangerous to let go. To our mind, the event is as certain to happen as any event which depends on the contingencies of the future, viz.: that unless means be devised for gra

dually relieving the slave States from the undue pressure of this class upon them-unless some way be opened by which they may be rid of their surplus black population-the time will come-it may not be in the next nor in the succeeding generation-but, sooner or later, come it will, and come it must-when the two races will join in the death struggle for the mastery."

James G. Birney, of Kentucky, under whom the Abolitionists first became a National Party, and for whom they voted for President in 1844, giving him 66,304 votes,says:

"We have so long practiced injustice, adding to it hypocrisy, in the treatment of the colored race, both negroes and Indians, that we begin to regard injustice as an element-a chief element -the chief element of our government. But no government which admits injustice as an element can be a harmonious one or a permanent one. Harmony is the antagonist of injustice, ever has been, and ever will be; that is, so long as injustice lasts, which cannot always be, for it is a lie, a semblance, therefore, perishable. True, from the imperfection of man, his ambition and selfishness, injustice often finds its way incidentally into the administration of public affairs, and maintains its footing a long time before it is cast out by the legitimate elements of government."

"Our slave States, especially the more southern of them, in which the number of slaves is greater, and in which, of course the sentiment of injustice is stronger than in the more northern ones, are to be placed on the list of decaying communities. To a philosophic observer, they seem to be falling back on the scale of civilization. Even at the present point of retrogression, the cause of civilization and human improvement would lose nothing by their annihilation."

THE VOICE OF DELAWARE.

Strong anti-slavery sentiment had become popular in

Delaware as early as 1785. With Maryland and Missouri,
it may now be ranked as a semi-slave State. Mr. McLane,
a member of Congress from this State in 1825, said :-

"I shall not imitate the example of other gentlemen by making professions of my love of liberty and abhorrence of slavery, not, however, because I do not entertain them. I am an enemy to slavery."

Slavery has little vitality in Maryland. Baltimore, the
+
greatest city of the South-greatest because freest-has a
population of more than two hundred thousand souls, and
yet less than three thousand of these are slaves. In spite
of all the unjust and oppressive statutes enacted by the
oligarchy, the non-slaveholders, who with the exception
of a small number of slaveholding emancipationists, may
in truth be said to be the only class of respectable and
patriotic citizens in the South, have wisely determined
that their noble State shall be freed from the sin and the
shame, the crime and the curse of slavery; and in accor-
dance with this determination, long since formed, they are
giving every possible encouragement to free white labor,
thereby, very properly, rendering the labor of slaves both
unprofitable and disgraceful. The formation of an Aboli-
tion Society in this State, in 1789, was the result of the
influence of the masterly speeches delivered in the House
of Delegates, by the Hon. William Pinkney, whose undy-
ing testimony we have already placed on record. Nearly
seventy years ago, this eminent lawyer and Statesman
declared to the people of America, that if they did not

mark out the bounds of slavery, and adopt measures for its total extinction, it would finally "work a decay of the spirit of liberty in the free States." Further, he said that, "by the eternal principles of natural justice, no master in the State has a right to hold his slave in bondage a single hour." In 1787, Luther Martin, of this State, said :

"Slavery is inconsistent with the genius of republicanism, and has a tendency to destroy those principles on which it is supported, as it lessens the sense of the equal rights of mankind, and habituates us to tyranny and oppression."

After introducing the unreserved and immortal testimony of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and the other great men of the Old Dominion, against the institu tion of slavery, it may to some, seem quite superfluous to back the cause of Freedom by arguments from other Virginia abolitionists; but this State, notwithstanding all her more modern manners and inhumanity, has been so prolific of just views and noble sentiments, that we deem it eminently fit and proper to blazon many of them to the world as the redeeming features of her history. An Abolition Society was formed in this State in 1791. In a memorial which the members of this Society presented to Congress, they pronounced slavery "not only an odious degradation, but an outrageous violation of one of the most essential rights of human nature, and utterly repugnant to the precepts of the Gospel." A Bill of Rights, unanimously agreed upon by the Virginia Convention of June 12, 1776, holds