lements of their government
that William III. could not repeat Charles I. Let us profit by the
lesson. * * *

If all I have said to you is untrue, if I have exaggerated, explain to
me this fact. In 1831, Mr. Garrison commenced a paper advocating the
doctrine of immediate emancipation. He had against him the thirty
thousand churches and all the clergy of the country,--its wealth, its
commerce, its press. In 1831, what was the state of things? There was
the most entire ignorance and apathy on the slave question. If men
knew of the existence of slavery, it was only as a part of picturesque
Virginia life. No one preached, no one talked, no one wrote about it. No
whisper of it stirred the surface of the political sea. The church heard
of it occasionally, when some colonization agent asked funds to send
the blacks to Africa. Old school-books tainted with some antislavery
selections had passed out of use, and new ones were compiled to suit the
times. Soon as any dissent from the prevailing faith appeared, every one
set himself to crush it. The pulpits preached at it; the press denounced
it; mobs tore down houses, threw presses into the fire and the stream,
and shot the editors; religious conventions tried to smother it; parties
arrayed themselves against it. Daniel Webster boasted in the Senate,
that he had never introduced the subject of slavery to that body, and
never would. Mr. Clay, in 1839, makes a speech for the Presidency, in
which he says, that to discuss the subject of slavery is moral treason,
and that no man has a right to introduce the subject into Congress.
Mr. Benton, in 1844, laid down his platform, and he not only denies the
right, but asserts that he never has and never will discuss the subject.
Yet Mr. Clay, from 1839 down to his death, hardly made a remarkable
speech of any kind, except on slavery. Mr. Webster, having indulged now
and then in a little easy rhetoric, as at Niblo's and elsewhere, opens
his mouth in 1840, generously contributing his aid to both sides, and
stops talking about it only when death closes his lips. Mr. Benton's
six or eight speeches in the United States Senate have all been on the
subject of slavery in the Southwestern section of the country, and form
the basis of whatever claim he has to the character of a statesman, and
he owes his seat in the next Congress somewhat, perhaps, to anti-slavery
pretentions! The Whig and Democratic parties pledged themselves just as
emphatically again