em, and
exciting to their audiences. Mr. Douglass's forte was in oratory; in
exposing the hideousness of slavery and the wrongs of his race. Mr.
Ward--a _protege_ of Gerrit Smith's--was scholarly, thoughtful,
logical, and eloquent. Mr. Douglass was generally worsted in debate,
but always triumphant in oratory. A careful study of Mr. Douglass's
speeches from the time he began his career as a public speaker down to
the present time reveals wonderful progress in their grammatical and
synthetical structure. He grew all the time. On the 12th of May, 1846,
he delivered a speech at Finsbury Chapel, Moorfields, England, from
which the following is extracted:

"All the slaveholder asks of me is silence. He does not ask me to
go abroad and preach _in favor_ of slavery; he does not ask any
one to do that. He would not say that slavery is a good thing,
but the best under the circumstances. The slaveholders want total
darkness on the subject. They want the hatchway shut down, that
the monster may crawl in his den of darkness, crushing human
hopes and happiness, destroying the bondman at will, and having
no one to reprove or rebuke him. Slavery shrinks from the light;
it hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest its deeds
should be reproved. To tear off the mask from this abominable
system, to expose it to the light of heaven, aye, to the heat of
the sun, that it may burn and wither it out of existence, is my
object in coining to this country. I want the slaveholder
surrounded, as by a wall of anti-slavery fire, so that he may see
the condemnation of himself and his system glaring down in
letters of light. I want him to feel that he has no sympathy in
England, Scotland, or Ireland; that he has none in Canada, none
in Mexico, none among the poor wild Indians; that the voice of
the civilized, aye, and savage world is against him. I would have
condemnation blaze down upon him in every direction, till,
stunned and overwhelmed with shame and confusion, he is compelled
to let go the grasp he holds upon the persons of his victims, and
restore them to their long-lost rights."

This was in 1846. On the 5th of July, 1852, at Rochester, New York,
he, perhaps, made the most effective speech of his life. The poet
Sheridan has written: "Eloquence consists in the man, the subject, and
the occasion." None of these conditions