upon that occasion, as upon many other similar ones, was faithful to the responsibility of his office.
In the year 1862 the nation was convulsed with the war consequent upon the Southern Rebellion; our soldiers, wounded and dying in hospitals and on battle-fields; claimed all possible aid from the community; antislavery sentiments were spreading widely through the North, and it was believed to be feasible and expedient to obtain the funds needful for our enterprise by direct appeal to the old and new friends of the cause. Therefore, our series of fairs closed with the twenty-sixth, in December, 1861.
The money raised by this Society in various ways amounted to about $35,000. Nearly the whole of this revenue has been expended in disseminating the principles of our cause, by means of printed documents and public lectures and discussions. In the earlier years of this Society, a school for colored children, established and taught by Sarah M. Douglass, was partially sustained from our treasury. We occasionally contributed, from our treasury, small sums for the use of the Vigilance Committees, organized to assist fugitive slaves who passed through this State on their way to a land where their right to liberty would be protected. But these enterprises were always regarded as of secondary importance to our great work of direct appeal to the conscience of the nation, in behalf of the slave's claim to immediate, unconditional emancipation. To this end a large number of tracts and pamphlets have been circulated by this Society; but its chief agencies have been the anti-slavery newspapers of the country. Regarding these as the most powerful instrumentalities in the creation of that public sentiment which was essential to the overthrow of slavery, we expended a considerable portion of our funds in the direct circulation of The Liberator, The Pennsylvania Freeman, and The National Anti-Slavery Standard, and a small amount in the circulation of other anti-slavery papers. Our largest appropriations of money have been made to the Pennsylvania and American Anti-Slavery Societies, and by those Societies to the support of their organs and lecturing agents.
The financial statistics of this Society are easily recorded. Certain great and thrilling events which marked its history are easily told and written. But the life which it lived through all its thirty-six years; the influence which flowed from it, directly and indirectly, to the nation's heart; the work quietly done by its members, individually, through the word spoken in season, the brave, self-sacrificing deed, the example of fidelity in a critical hour, the calm endurance unto the end; these can be written in no earthly book of remembrance. Its life is lived; its work is done; its memorial is sealed. It assembles to-day to take one parting look across its years; to breathe in silence its unutterable thanksgiving; to disband its membership, and cease to be. Reviewing its experience of labor and endurance, the united voices of its members testify that it has been a service whose reward was in itself; and contemplating the grandeur of the work accomplished (in which it has been permitted to bear a humble part), the overthrow of American slavery, the uplifting from chattelhood to citizenship of four millions of human souls; with one heart and one voice we cry, "Not unto us, O Lord! not
