hunted
another through the streets of a great Northern city in 1835; and within
a few weeks a regiment of colored soldiers, many of them bearing the
marks of the slave-driver's whip on their backs, marched out before a
vast multitude tremulous with newly-stirred sympathies, through the
streets of the same city, to fight our battles in the name of God and
Liberty!

The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles at
their door, are apt to be severe also on what they contemptuously
emphasize as "sentiments" considered as motives of action. It is
charitable to believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly
understand the meaning of the words they use, but rather play with them,
as certain so-called "learned" quadrupeds play with the printed
characters set before them. In all questions involving duty, we act from
sentiments. Religion springs from them, the family order rests upon
them, and in every community each act involving a relation between any
two of its members implies the recognition or the denial of a sentiment.
It is true that men often forget them or act against their bidding in the
keen competition of business and politics. But God has not left the hard
intellect of man to work out its devices without the constant presence of
beings with gentler and purer instincts. The breast of woman is the
ever-rocking cradle of the pure and holy sentiments which will sooner or
later steal their way into the mind of her sterner companion; which will
by and by emerge in the thoughts of the world's teachers, and at last
thunder forth in the edicts of its law-givers and masters. Woman herself
borrows half her tenderness from the sweet influences of maternity; and
childhood, that weeps at the story of suffering, that shudders at the
picture of wrong, brings down its inspiration "from God, who is our
home." To quarrel, then, with the class of minds that instinctively
attack abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to sneer at the
sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous actions, is
merely a display of unthinking levity, or of want of the natural
sensibilities.

With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one
direction, and the awakened conscience of the North stirring in the
other, the open conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally
inevitable its appearance in the field of national politics. For what is
meant by self-government is, that a man shal