Cincinnati, they were counseled by
their friends not to do so. There was danger that the mobs of Covington
and Cincinnati would assassinate them publicly; and it is notorious that
the opposing arguments that reached Washington from the North and from
the South advanced no further in either direction. This impugned and
belied the very freedom declared in the Declaration and Constitution;
and made both the mockery of Europe. The contradiction is reconciled;
the taunt is silenced; speech is legally free and protected over all the
Union, and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society has done more than any
other agency--more than all other agencies combined--to vitalize the
Constitution and give being to the Declaration. This society fought for
the glowing assertion of all the centuries: That men are born free and
equal, and are endowed with inalienable right to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. It kept the contrast between the declaration and
its practise in a clear light. It repeated the assertion and reasserted
it. It argued the justice with the very facts and reasons that had been
presented to the Congress by whom the Declaration was framed.
Undisturbed by ridicule, unchecked by hostility, undaunted by
persecution, it has kept the law in the van of the fight; sustained it
by reserves of humane reason; by appeals to national strength and
welfare, and growth, and influence, and wealth; it disseminated the
truth in churches, at the polls, in lyceums, by the press; it was
unanswerable because its claim was founded in equity, and recognized in
religion, and had ineradicable place in the great muniment of national
being. It appealed to the individual conscience as well as to pride,
patriotism, piety, and interest, and it won, and now celebrates a
victory immeasurably greater than that of Yorktown or Waterloo or
Marathon. Those were the victories of nation over nation, or at the
utmost of a principle of limited application. We celebrate the
successful battle of the grandest principle in human organization; that
is confined to no race, limited to no country, cramped by no
restriction, but is as broad as the world, as applicable as humanity
itself and as enduring as time. The sentiment which elected Abraham
Lincoln was contained in an address delivered before the Pennsylvania
Abolition Society by Benjamin Rush, one of its earliest and most honored
members. It was: "Freedom and slavery cannot long exist together!"

Ladies and