hers had inscribed "Proclaim liberty throughout the world and to all
the inhabitants thereof," and was bedecked with garlands and every
insignia of a joyful people in honor of the Hungarian patriot, Louis
Kossuth. Distinctive platforms had been erected for speakers whose
fatherland was in many foreign lands. Upon each was an orator receiving
the appreciation and plaudits of an audience whose hearts beat as one
for success to the "Great Liberator." The "unwelcome guests," the
colored men present, quickly embraced the opportunity, utilizing for a
platform a dry goods box, upon which I was placed to give the Negro
version of this climax of inconsistency and quintessence of hypocrisy.
This was the unexpected. All the people, both native and foreign, had
been invited and special places provided for all except the Negro, and
on the native platform he was not allowed space. The novelty of the
incident and curiosity to hear what the colored man had to say quickly
drew a crowd equal to others of the occasion. Then, as now, and perhaps
forever, there was that incalculable number of non-committals whose
moral sense is disturbed by popular wrong, but who are without courage
of conviction, inert, waiting for a leader that they may be one of the
two that take place behind him, or one of three or four, or ten, who
follow in serried ranks, that constitute the wedge-like motor that
splits asunder hoary wrong, proximity to the leader being in ratio to
their moral fibre. Most of the audience listened to the utterance of
sentiments that the allurements of trade, or the exactions of society,
forbade them to disseminate.

The occasion was an excellent one to demonstrate the heartlessness of
the projectors, who, while pretending to glorify liberty in the
distance, were treating it with contumely at home, where 3,000,000
slaves were held in bondage, and feeling keenly the ostracism of the
slave as beyond the pole of popular sympathy or national compassion,
with words struggling for utterance, I spoke as best I could, receiving
toleration, and a quiet measure of approbation, possibly on the
supposition, realized in the fruition of time, that such discussion
might eventuate in the liberation of white men from the octopus of
subserviency to the dictum of slavery which permeated every ramification
of American society. I heard Hon. Cassius M. Clay, of Kentucky, sometime
in the forties, while making a speech in Philadelphia, say: "Gentlemen,
the que