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rated into the Declaration of Independence. The language is familiar to all, and i will not quote it. It is a clear and concise statement of the natural equality of all men to protection from Government, and to the enjoyment of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It is erroneously asserted and unfairly contended that the broad application, which the opponents of slavery make of this language, secures to all classes and conditions of people equality of social relations and of political rights.' Social relations are prompted by natural affinities, and it is not the appropriate object of Government to interfere with them. Political rights emanate from Government, and the extent which they are to be enjoyed "by, and applied to, particular persons, is addressed to the sound discretion of the law-making power. Natural rights emanate from the Creator, and Government cannot therefore improperly interfere with them; and this is the sense in which the Declaration of Independence declares all men created equal. We do not deny to women their equality with men as to natural rights because we do not allow them the civil right to vote; and the same remark will apply to minors and unnaturalized foreigners. This statement, in the Declaration, of the natural equality of men, was the platform upon which the Revolution was fought. Its inspiring sentiments were its war-cry. This platform determines the wrongfulness of chattel slavery as an institution everywhere, for it cannot exist without a destruction of those natural rights it declares to be inalienable. This sentiment, anterior to July, 1776, pervaded the discussions of the colonies, growing out of their relations to the mother country, and they clearly saw that chattel slavery was inconsistent with it. The colonies found it here in violation of that just and cardinal maxim of civil government, which, in 1776, they so truthfully, clearly, and boldly, announced to the world. So sensible was Mr. Jefferson of this, that in his original draft of the Declaration, he inserted as one of the causes of complaint against the King of Great Britain, that he had interposed his veto power to prevent the colonies from suppressing by legislation "this execrable commerce" in human beings. This was his language: "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep a market where men should be bought and sold, he has at length prostituted his negative for suppressing any legislative attempt to prohibit and restrain this execrable commerce." I need not further quote from the writings of the prominent men who inaugurated and carried forward the Revolution, to show that

this sentiment was general. It is conceded by intelligent men from the South. I assert, without the fear of successful contradiction from any source, that the preponderance of public sentiment in a majority of the States, at the close of the Revolution, and for a long time afterwards, was against the policy and against the rightfulness of chattel slavery, as it then existed in those States. I assert further, as the corollary of that sentiment, that it was the general expectation that slavery would gradually disappear from all the States, through the instrumentality of our republican form of government, and through the humanitarian influence of our Christian civilization. The framers of the Constitution excluded from it the word slavery, as a hateful term, and it was left out, as Mr. Madison said, because they did not wish to recognise the rightfulness of property in man. I have no doubt they had in view the future state of the country, when slavery should be abolished in all of the States, and adapted the Constitution to that state of things. It has been conceded by Southern men, in the House and in the Senate, this session, that the leading men of the slave States, before and after the adoption of the Constitution, uttered anti-slavery sentiments; but it is contended that they really were not opposed to slavery per se—that it was sentimentalism merely, an abstraction, or speculation, and not intended as a condemnation of the system. They clearly expressed themselves as opposed to it per se; and if they did not mean what they said, then they added to the practice of the wrong of slavery the hypocrisy of double dealing. I do not charge them with that, for they were honest men. The gentleman from Alabama, [Mr. Currey,] in his able speech, delivered here on the 14th day of March last, upon this point, said: "Scarce a speech has been made or an essay written, for ten years, against slavery, in which the opinions of the early fathers of the Republic are not introduced. These, however, were but mere speculations, and were not engrafted upon the organic law; and actual results are a safer standard by which to measure abstract principles. Besides, times have changed since this Government was first inaugurated as an experiment, not yet satisfactorily tested. Then there were but little over half a million slaves, and scarce a pound of raw cotton exported. "African slavery is now a great fact—a political, social, industrial, humanitarian fact. Its chief product is king, and freights Northern vessels, drives Northern machinery, feeds Northern laborers, and clothes the entire population. Northern, no less than Southern, capital and labor are dependent, in great degree, upon it, and these results were wholly unanticipated by the good men who are so industriously paraded as clouds of witnesses against the institution. "Slavery has altered, and men's opinions have altered." Senator Mason, of Virginia, in a debate upon