nd retired in silence. All felt the deep responsibility of the
occasion--the shadow and forecast of a life-long struggle rested upon
every countenance."

The effects, so electrical and impressive, which followed the reading of
the declaration were not disproportioned to its merits, for it was an
instrument of singular power, wisdom, and eloquence. Indeed, to this
day, more than half a century after it was written it still has virtue
to quicken the breath and stir the pulses of a sympathetic reader out of
their normal time. A great passion for freedom and righteousness
irradiates like a central light the whole memorable document. It begins
by a happy reference to an earlier convention, held some fifty-seven
years before in the same place, and which adopted a declaration holding
"that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, LIBERTY, and
the pursuit of happiness;" and how at the trumpet-call of its authors
three millions of people rushed to arms "deeming it more glorious to die
instantly as free men, than desirable to live one hour as slaves"; and
how, though few in number and poor in resources those same people were
rendered invincible by the conviction that truth, justice, and right
were on their side. But the freedom won by the men of 1776 was
incomplete without the freedom for which the men of 1833 were striving.
The authors of the new declaration would not be inferior to the authors
of the old "in purity of motive, in earnestness of zeal, in decision of
purpose, intrepidity of action, in steadfastness of faith, in sincerity
of spirit." Unlike the older actors, the younger had eschewed the sword,
the spilling of human blood in defence of their principles. Theirs was a
moral warfare, the grappling of truth with error, of the power of love
with the inhumanities of the nation. Then it glances at the wrongs which
the fathers suffered, and at the enormities which the slaves were
enduring. The "fathers were never slaves, never bought and sold like
cattle, never shut out from the light of knowledge and religion, never
subjected to the lash of brutal taskmasters," but all these woes and
more, an unimaginable mountain of agony and misery, was the appalling
lot of the slaves in the Southern States. The guilt of this nation,
which partners such a crime against human nature, "is unequaled by any
other on earth," and therefore it is bound to instan