ration the future
history of England must greatly depend.

This Stafford House meeting, in any view of it, is a most remarkable
fact. Kind and gratifying as its arrangements have been to me, I am far
from appropriating it to myself individually, as a personal honor. I
rather regard it as the most public expression possible of the feelings
of the women of England on one of the most important questions of our
day--that, of individual liberty considered in its religious bearings.

The most splendid of England's palaces has this day opened its doors to
the slave. Its treasures of wealth and of art, its prestige of high name
and historic memories, have been consecrated to the acknowledgment of
Christianity in that form, wherein, in our day, it is most frequently
denied--the recognition of the brotherhood of the human family, and the
equal religious value of every human soul. A fair and noble hand by this
meeting has fixed, in the most public manner, an ineffaceable seal to
the beautiful sentiments of that most Christian document, the letter of
the ladies of Great Britain to the ladies of America. That letter and
this public attestation of it are now historic facts, which wait their
time and the judgment of advancing Christianity.

Concerning that letter I have one or two things to say. Nothing can be
more false than the insinuation that has been thrown out in some
American papers, that it was a political movement. It had its first
origin in the deep religious feelings of the man whose whole life has
been devoted to the abolition of the white-labor slavery of Great
Britain; the man whose eye explored the darkness of the collieries, and
counted the weary steps of the cotton spinners--who penetrated the dens
where the insane were tortured with darkness, and cold, and stripes; and
threaded the loathsome alleys of London, haunts of fever and cholera:
this man it was, whose heart was overwhelmed by the tale of American
slavery, and who could find no relief from, this distress except in
raising some voice to the ear of Christianity. Fearful of the jealousy
of political interference, Lord Shaftesbury published an address to the
ladies of England, in which he told them that he felt himself moved by
an irresistible impulse to entreat them to raise their voice, in the
name of a common Christianity and womanhood, to their American sisters.
The abuse which has fallen upon him for this most Christian proceeding
does not in the least sur