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BONDAGE AND FREEDOM

tucky Home," and "'Uncle Ned," can make the heart sad as well as merry,
and can call forth a tear as well as a smile. They awaken the sympathies for
the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root, grow, and flourish. In
addition to authors, poets, and scholars at home, the moral sense of the civilized world is with us. England. France, and Germany, the three great
lights of modem civilization, are with us, and every American traveler
learns to regret the existence of slavery in his country. The growth of intelligence. the influence of commerce, steam, wind, and lightning are our allies. It would be easy to amplify this summary, and to swell the vast conglomeration of our material forces; but there is a deeper and truer method of
measuring the power of our cause, and of comprehending its vitality. This is
to be found in its accordance with the best elements of human nature. It is
beyond the power of slavery to annihilate affinities recognized and established by the Almighty. The slave is bound to mankind by the powerful and
inextricable net-work of human brotherhood. His voice is the voice of a
man, and his cry is the cry of a man in distress, and man must cease to he
man before he can become insensible to that cry. It is the righteousness of
the cause--the humanity of the cause--which constitutes its potency. As
one genuine bank-bill is worth more than a thousand counterfeits, so is one
man, with right on his side, worth more than a thousand in the wrong. '"One
may chase a thousand, and put ten thousand to flight." It is, therefore, upon
the goodness of our cause, more than upon all other auxiIiaries, that we depend for its final triumph.

Another source of congratulation is the fact that, amid all the efforts
made by the church, the government, and the people at large, to stay the onward progress of this movement, its course has been onward, steady,
straight, unshaken, and unchecked from the beginning. Slavery has gained
victories large and numerous; but never as against this movement--against
a temporizing policy, and against northern timidity, the slave power has
been victorious; but against the spread and prevalence in the country, of a
spirit of resistance to its aggression, and of sentiments favorahle to its entire
overthrow, it has yet accomplished nothing. Every measure, yet devised
and executed, having for its object the suppression of anti-slavery, has been
as idle and fruitless as pouring oil to extinguish fire. A general rejoicing
took place on the passage of "the compromise measures" of 1850. Those
measures were called peace measures, and were afterward termed by both
the great parties of the country, as well as by leading statesmen, a final settlement of the whole question of slavery; but experience has laughed to
scorn the wisdom of pro-slavery statesmen; and their final settlement of ag-