st the antislavery discussion,--against agitation and
free speech. These men said: "It sha'n't be talked about; it won't be
talked about!" These are your statesmen!--men who understand the present
that is, and mould the future! The man who understands his own time, and
whose genius moulds the future to his views, he is a statesman, is he
not? These men devoted themselves to banks, to the tariff, to internal
improvements, to constitutional and financial questions. They said to
slavery: "Back! no entrance here! We pledge ourselves against you."
And then there came up a little printer-boy, who whipped them into
the traces, and made them talk, like Hotspur's starling, nothing
BUT slavery. He scattered all these gigantic shadows,--tariff, bank,
constitutional questions, financial questions; and slavery, like
the colossal head in Walpole's romance, came up and filled the whole
political horizon! Yet you must remember he is not a statesman! he is
a "fanatic." He has no discipline,--Mr. "Ion" says so; he does not
understand the "discipline that is essential to victory"! This man did
not understand his own time, he did not know what the future was to
be,--he was not able to shape it--he had no "prudence,"--he had no
"foresight"! Daniel Webster says, "I have never introduced this subject,
and never will,"--and dies broken-hearted because he had not been
able to talk enough about it! Benton says, "I will never speak of
slavery,"--and lives to break with his party on this issue! Clay says it
is "moral treason" to introduce the subject into Congress--and lives to
see Congress turned into an antislavery debating society, to suit the
purpose of one "too powerful individual." * * * Remember who it was
that said in 1831: "I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not
excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--and I will be heard!" That
speaker has lived twenty-two years, and the complaint of twenty-three
millions of people is, "Shall we never hear of any thing but slavery?"
* * * "Well, it is all HIS fault" [pointing to Mr. Garrison]. * * * It
seems to me that such men may point to the present aspect of the nation,
to their originally avowed purpose, to the pledges and efforts of all
your great men against them, and then let you determine to which side
the credit of sagacity and statesmanship belongs. Napoleon busied
himself at St. Helena in showing how Wellington ought to have conquered
at Waterloo. The world has never got time to li