across the path to success and palsies the very right hand that you should stretch out to help the Slave! In the first place, this is begging the qustion, taking for granted the very point we deny, to wit, that voting at the polls is the only, or the most efficient, means of political action. But admitting it to be true, can there be any question in the case, if our opinions are what we have affirmed? Though taking office or voting for other men under the Constitution should have the most direct and immediate influence on the Abolition of Slavery, we are not to purchase even so great a boon as that at the expense of doing what we believe to be wrong. We know men who profess to believe that the preservation of the Union by obedience to the Fugitive Slave Law is the best thing that can be done for ultimate Emancipation. But are they therefore excused for taking part in the commission of that infamous crime? Things may be Right which are not Expedient, but nothing can be Expedient that is not Right. It might seem to be the most expedient thing in the world to assassinate Nicholas of Russia, or Francis Joseph of Austria, or the Pope of Rome; but no man holding assassination in abhorrence would consent to the crime for the sake of the consequences. We acknowledge the weight of our duty to the Slave; but it is not the primary, the paramount, duty. The first and highest duty of every man is to himself, to keep himself above all taint, if not above all suspicion. The Slave has a right to demand of us anything except our honor. Our own integrity it is our first duty to maintain. In short, the whole No Voting Theory is simply a question of personal honor, of individual integrity. Whether being faithful to this first trust will be most conducive to the success of our second trust, the Anti-Slavery movement, we will not affirm, though we believe it with our whole hearts. But the Slaves have no right to ask us to pay this price for their deliverance, admitting that it is necessary to it. We may not be more faithful to Man than to God.

This course we pursue entirely irrespective of its effect upon the Abolition of Slavery. We do not, in the first instance, abstain from holding or conferring office because we think that we shall thus soonest abolish Slavery; but because we think that this is the only way in which we can keep ourselves honest men. Even if our conduct in this respect should have the effect of postponing or preventing Emancipation, it should make no difference to us. Even if we were assured that by the assassination of Mr. FILLMORE or the poisoning of Mr. WEBSTER we should greatly hasten or completely compass our great end, we should decline the operation, as long as we hold opinions ad

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verse to such modes of disposing of criminals. We look upon the rendition of an innocent fugitive Slave, under any imaginable circumstances, as a much more enormous, as it is a more mean and cowardly, crime than the assassination or poisoning of any of the felon tools of tyranny, and, therefore, as we never mean to commit it ourselves, we neither intend to promise to do so, nor to appoint a deputy to do it for us.

But though our sober First Thought teaches us that this is the course pointed out by Consistency and Honor, in the relations in which we find ourselves, and with the views we are compelled to take of them, our sober Second Thought satisfies us that it is not only the only Right, but the only Expedient one for us to pursue. We believe that no great moral, or physical, revolution can be accomplished except by men who act up to their highest ideas of Right in the matter with which the revolution is concerned. In other words, that it is not Expedient for a man to do, for any object whatever, what he thinks to be Wrong. We think that our method is the one which common sense, rightly understood, and history, as far as it has any analogies to offer, indicate as the true one.

The Abolition of Slavery presupposes a Revolution. It will be a Revolution. For it will radically overthrow and reconstruct the Institutions of the Nation. It may be a Revolution fought out on Marston Moors or Bunker Hills, or its victories may be won on the logomachic fields of parliamentary debate, and decided by aye and no, and not by bayonet and sabre. It may be a Revolution like that which struck off the head of Monarchy before White Hall in 1649, or it may be one like that which virtually annihilated the House of Lords, as a substantive independent branch of the Government, in the adjoining Parliament House, in 1832. But, come in what shape it may, it will be a Revolution, and it will be brought about like all other Revolutions that the world has ever known. And how is that? Solely by the change which had been gradually wrought in the feelings, the wishes, the ideas of the Nation, which was at once the object and the agent of the Revolution. It is the wholesome discontents, the righteous dissatisfactions, arising in the minds of the people, in the presence of the abuses by which they find themselves surrounded, that drive men to embrace the alternative of Revolution. It is the men who first discern these abuses, who fan these discontents, who foment these dissatisfactions, that are the true movers of the Revolution, and not those who become prominent when it first begins to take unto itself form and

proportion. It was not Cromwell that struck off the head of Charles. He was but the creature of the men who, for more than a century had been trying, first, to Reform the Church, and next to Reform the Reformation, and who had encountered torture, confiscation, exile and death in their course. It was not ОTIs, nor ADAMS, nor WASHINGTON, that made the Revolution of 1776. They but obeyed the impulse which had swept down to them over Leyden and over Plymouth, from those old times of Puritan resistance to Power in defence of Rights. It was not Earl Grey that palsied the House of Lords by the touch of the Reform Bill. He only executed the purpose which had been strengthening in the English Mind for a half century, and for encouraging which HARDY and HORNE TOOKE and THELWALL were tried for their lives not forty years before. He received the Garter for accomplishing what they narrowly escaped the Halter for attempting.

Now it is precisely this necessary part in the true American Revolution which the Abolitionists of the American Anti-Slavery Society are engaged in performing. They are compelling the attention of the people to the actual state of the facts and institutions in the midst of which they live. They are applying the truths, urging the arguments, appealing to the hearts and to the highest material interests of the Nation, which go to create that determination in the general mind which stops not short of Revolution. They are arousing the Consciences and awakening the Passions of great masses of men, which, when. aroused and awakened, sweep onward with irresistible sway to their design. Slavery exists in this country, and governs it, because the People choose to have it so. Because they have no lively sense of the atrocity of the Slave System nor of their own guilt in consenting to it. Because they doubt whether, on the whole, they may not be better off with Slavery than they would be after the exertion necessary to destroy it, or to remove themselves from their support of it. Because, like all mankind before them, they will long choose to "bear the ills they have" rather than take the trouble and incur the risk of reforming them. This vis inertia has to be overcome in every case of Reformation or of Revolution. And this is what we are doing. This moral lethargy and insensibility is to be disturbed and alarmed. And, if we may believe our enemies, we have done this part of our work, or rather have begun to do it, tolerably well. great political change can be effected. Nation is thoroughly aroused and fully in

Until this is done, no When the great body of a earnest to abate an abuse

or evil institution, be it even the institution of its own Government, it is sure to do its pleasure.

When the people of the Northern States are as determined that Slavery shall no longer exist by their consent or their coöperation, as the Puritans and their descendants in England and America were to obtain the purposes of their successive Revolutions, and as the British Nation was to secure Catholic Emancipation, Parliamentary Reform, West India Emancipation and Free Trade in Food, they will find ways and means of carrying their determination into effect. They may be trusted to find the weapons of their warfare, if the spirit can but be breathed into them. And until they are so prepared, it is quite in vain to expect to hasten their motions by the manoeuvres of small parties and the tactics of pinioned politicians. The Whig or the Democratic party, or both together, will do the will of the People, when that will is formed and resolute, as well as the Free Soil Party itself. We rejoiced at the formation of that party, as we do at its occasional successes, both for the proofs they afford that we have done something, and for the assistance they give us in our own work. We think the occasional election of a Representative or a Senator of consequence, not for anything they can do for the overthrow of Slavery, in Congress, but because of the Agitation of the subject which the strifes attending their elections, or their faint and ineffectual struggles on the floor, create in the country. We believe that if the energy wasted on those elections, and in those futile attempts, was concentrated on the creation of the public sentiment, which is supreme and despotic everywhere, the end would come far more quickly. But we are content to receive help in whatever form it may approach us, though we cannot accept it as the sufficient remedy.

OUR PHILOSOPHY.

It is now near three thousand years since the Hebrew Prophet put into rememberable verse the truth that "there is no peace to the wicked." The history of mankind ever since, as well as always before, has confirmed the truth of the apothegm, and yet mankind seem as far off from receiving it as when Isaiah first uttered it in the ears of unbelieving Israel. Indeed, one would judge, from the care with which they seek to preserve and protect their crimes, that they esteem them "the things that do most pertain unto their peace instead of being essentially incompatible with it. Peace is what all nations, as

well as all men, pursue as the main condition of happiness; not peace as distinguished from war merely, but the quiet enjoyment of possessions and institutions, and freedom from disturbance or alarm with regard to them. Yet how few either of men or nations recognize the truth that righteousnessa scrupulous observance of moral obligations and a careful regard to all the rights of others is indispensable to this peace and safety. Few men, indeed, and no nations, have advanced to the perception of these axioms on which depend the solution of all moral and political problems. Or rather, perhaps, they have an instinctive feeling that what is good in their customs and laws will take care of itself, while it is the evil that is in them that calls for nurture and protection. Certainly, they appear to cling to their vices and their mischiefs as if they were all that made existence a blessing.

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There are not many persons in this country who boldly avow that Slavery is a blessing per se, and therefore to be cherished and defended. Indeed, the great mass of the self-constituted expounders of popular opinion, in the North at least, profess to regard it as a moral evil and an abstract wrong. And yet what has been the burden of national political action and of the answering responses of press and pulpit for years, and especially for the last eighteen months, but the duty of noninterference with this evil and wrong, and denunciation of those who are aiming their blows at it. The American People have been at issue with the Almighty for the last sixty years, if the son of Amoz rightly expressed the Divine Mind. There is no peace, saith my God, to. the wicked!" "The country must have peace," saith DANIEL WEBSTER, and the cry is re-echoed through the land. But how? By strengthening the bands of wickedness and agreeing to be even worse than our fathers, in the days of their comparative ignorance, engaged for us that we should be! Now the battle is joined, and we shall see which of the combatants will prevail. We have no fears as to the result. Although the odds often seem to the eyes that look only on the outward appearance against the success of the Truth, yet they that be with her are more than they that be against her, as is always found in the issue of the battle. We do not believe that there is any Titanic power in that "least erected" as well as most impious and cruel of fiends which the American people now exalt above all that is called God, that can depose the Ruler of the Universe and bring his counsels to naught.

In every attempt to remove political or moral evils, the days of darkness are many. Men say things shall be forever as they now are.