ern States would have united to form a society that included in its
objects any discussion of the moral duties arising from the institution of
Slavery. Admitting the first part of their proposition, we deny the
conclusion they seek to draw from it. They are guilty of a glaring
anachronism in assuming the same opinions and prejudices to have existed
in 1825 which are undoubtedly influential in 1858. The Antislavery
agitation did not begin until 1831, and the debates in the Virginia
Convention prove conclusively that six years after the foundation of the
Tract Society, the leading men in that State, men whose minds had been
trained and whose characters had been tempered in that school of action
and experience which was open to all during the heroic period of our
history, had not yet suffered such distortion of the intellect through
passion, and such deadening of the conscience through interest, as would
have prevented their discussing either the moral or the political aspects
of Slavery, and precluded them from uniting in any effort to make the
relation between master and slave less demoralizing to the one and less
imbruting to the other.

Again, it is claimed that the words of the Constitution are conclusive,
and that the declaration that the publications of the Society shall be
such as are "satisfactory to all Evangelical Christians" forbids by
implication the issuing of any tract which could possibly offend the
brethren in Slave States. The Society, it is argued, can publish only on
topics about which all Evangelical Christians are agreed, and must,
therefore, avoid everything in which the question of politics is involved.
But what are the facts about matters other than Slavery? Tracts have been
issued and circulated in which Dancing is condemned as sinful; are all
Evangelical Christians agreed about this? On the Temperance question;
against Catholicism;--have these topics never entered into our politics?
The simple truth is, that Slavery is the only subject about which the
Publishing Committee have felt Constitutional scruples. Till this question
arose, they were like me in perfect health, never suspecting that they had
any constitution at all; but now, like hypochondriacs, they feel it in
every pore, at the least breath from the eastward.

If a strict construction of the words "all Evangelical Christians" be
insisted on, we are at a loss to see where the Committee could draw the
dividing line between what might be of