mperial virtue."

After speaking of the patronage extended to this science by the nations
and sovereigns of Europe, he terminates his developments with this
stirring appeal to his own countrymen:

"But what, in the mean time, have we been doing? While our fathers
were colonists of England we had no distinctive political or
literary character. The white cliffs of Albion covered the soil of
our nativity, though another hemisphere first opened our eyes on
the light of day, and oceans rolled between us and them. We were
Britons born, and we claimed to be the countrymen of Chaucer and
Shakspeare, Milton and Newton, Sidney and Locke, Arthur and Alfred,
as well as of Edward the Black Prince, Harry of Monmouth, and
Elizabeth. But when our fathers abjured the name of Britons, and
'assumed among the nations of the earth the separate and equal
station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled
them,' they tacitly contracted the engagement for themselves, and
above all for their posterity, to contribute, in their corporate
and national capacity, their full share, ay, and more than their
full share, of the virtues that elevate and of the graces that
adorn the character of civilized man. They announced themselves as
_reformers_ of the institution of civil society. They spoke of the
laws of nature, and in the name of nature's God; and by that sacred
adjuration they pledged us, their children, to labor with united
and concerted energy, from the cradle to the grave, to purge the
earth of all slavery; to restore the race of man to the full
enjoyment of those rights which the God of nature had bestowed upon
him at his birth; to disenthrall his limbs from chains, to break
the fetters from his feet and the manacles from his hands, and set
him free for the use of all his physical powers for the improvement
of his own condition. The God in whose name they spoke had taught
them, in the revelation of the Gospel, that the only way in which
man can discharge his duty to Him is by loving his neighbor as
himself, and doing with him as he would be done by; respecting his
rights while enjoying his own, and applying all his emancipated
powers of body and of mind to self-improvement and the improvement
of his race."

CHAPTER XIV.

REPORT ON THE RESOLVES OF THE LEGISLATURE OF