iping "abstract rights." And if there can
be such things, perhaps she was. Yet all Europe _rose_ to put her
sublime theories down. They declared her an enemy to the common peace;
that her doctrines alone violated the "law of neighborhood," and, as Mr.
Burke said, justly entitled them to anticipate the "damnum nondum
factum" of the civil law. Danton, Barrere, and the rest were apparently
astonished that umbrage should be taken. The parallel between them and
the abolitionists holds good in all respects.

The rise and progress of this fanaticism is one of the phenomena of the
age in which we live. I do not intend to repeat what I have already
said, or to trace its career more minutely at present. But the
legislation of Great Britain will make it historical, and doubtless you
must feel some curiosity to know how it will figure on the page of the
annalist. I think I can tell you. Though I have accorded and do accord
to you and your party, great influence in bringing about the
parliamentary action of your country, you must not expect to go down to
posterity as the only cause of it. Though _you_ trace the progenitors of
abolition from 1516, through a long stream with divers branches, down
to the period of its triumph in your country, it has not escaped
contemporaries, and will not escape posterity, that England, without
much effort, sustained the storm of its scoffs and threats, until the
moment arrived when she thought her colonies fully supplied with
Africans; and declared against the slave trade, only when she deemed it
unnecessary to her, and when her colonies, full of slaves, would have
great advantages over others not so well provided. Nor did she agree to
West India emancipation, until, discovering the error of her previous
calculation, it became an object to have slaves free throughout the
Western world, and, on the ruins of the sugar and cotton-growers of
America and the Islands, to build up her great slave empire in the East;
while her indefatigable exertions, still continued, to engraft the right
of search upon the law of nations, on the plea of putting an end to the
forever increasing slave trade, are well understood to have chiefly in
view the complete establishment of her supremacy at sea.[256] Nor must
you flatter yourself that your party will derive historic dignity from
the names of the illustrious British statesmen who have acted with it.
Their country's ends were theirs. They have stooped to use you, as the