As respects the candidates now before us, I can see no good reason why

colored voters as such should oppose General Grant, who, though not an

abolitionist and not even a member of the Republican party previous to

his nomination, has faithfully carried out the laws of Congress in their

behalf. Nor, on the other hand, can I see any just grounds for distrust

of such a man as Horace Greeley, who has so nobly distinguished himself

as the advocate of human rights irrespective of race or color, and who by

the instrumentality of his press has been for thirty years the educator

of the people in the principles of justice, temperance, and freedom.

Both of these men have, in different ways, deserved too well of the

country to be unnecessarily subjected to the brutalities of a

presidential canvass; and, so far as they are personally concerned, it

would doubtless have been better if the one had declined a second term of

uncongenial duties, and the other continued to indite words of wisdom in

the shades of Chappaqua. But they have chosen otherwise; and I am

willing, for one, to leave my colored fellow-citizens to the unbiased

exercise of their own judgment and instincts in deciding between them.

The Democratic party labors under the disadvantage of antecedents not

calculated to promote a rapid growth of confidence; and it is no matter

of surprise that the vote of the emancipated class is likely to be

largely against it. But if, as will doubtless be the case, that vote

shall be to some extent divided between the two candidates, it will have

the effect of inducing politicians of the rival parties to treat with

respect and consideration this new element of political power, from self-

interest if from no higher motive. The fact that at this time both

parties are welcoming colored orators to their platforms, and that, in

the South, old slave-masters and their former slaves fraternize at caucus

and barbecue, and vote for each other at the polls, is full of

significance. If, in New England, the very men who thrust Frederick

Douglass from car and stage-coach, and mobbed and hunted him like a wild

beast, now crowd to shake his hand and cheer him, let us not despair of

seeing even the Ku-Klux tarried into decency, and sitting "clothed in

their right minds" as listeners to their former victims. The colored man

is to-day the master of his own destiny. No power on earth can deprive

him of his rights as an American citizen. And it is in the light of

American citizenship that I choose to regard my colored friends, as men

having a common stake in the welfare of the country; mingled with, and

not separate from, their white fellow-citizens; not herded together as a

distinct class to be wielded by others, without self-dependence and

incapable of self-determination. Thanks to such men as Sumner and Wilson

and their compeers, nearly all that legislation can do for them has

already been done. We can now only help them to help themselves.

Industry, economy, temperance, self-culture, education for their

children,--these things, indispensable to their elevation and progress,

are in a great measure in their own hands.

You will, therefore, my friends and fellow-citizens, pardon me if I

decline to undertake to decide for you the question of your political

duty as respects the candidates for the presidency,--a question which you

have probably already settled in your own minds. If it had been apparent

to me that your rights and liberties were really in danger from the

success of either candidate, your letter would not have been needed to

call forth my opinion. In the long struggle of well-nigh forty years, I

can honestly say that no consideration of private interest, nor my

natural love of peace and retirement and the good-will of others, have

kept me silent when a word could be fitly spoken for human rights. I

have not so long acted with the class to which you belong without

acquiring respect for your intelligence and capacity for judging wisely

for yourselves. I shall abide your decision with confidence, and

cheerfully acquiesce in it.

If, on the whole, you prefer to vote for the reelection of General Grant,

let me hope you will do so without joining with eleventh-hour friends in

denouncing and reviling such an old and tried friend as Charles Sumner,

who has done and suffered so much in your behalf. If, on the other hand,

some of you decide to vote for Horace Greeley, you need not in so doing

forget your great obligations to such friends as William Lloyd Garrison,

Wendell Phillips, and Lydia Maria Child. Agree or disagree with them,

take their advice or reject it, but stand by them still, and teach the

parties with which you are connected to respect your feelings towards

your benefactors.

THE CENSURE OF SUMNER.

A letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser in reference to the petition

for the rescinding of the resolutions censuring Senator Sumner for

his motion to erase from the United States flags the record of the

battles of the civil war.

I BEG leave to occupy a small space in the columns of the Advertiser for

the purpose of noticing a charge which has been brought against the

petitioners for rescinding the resolutions of the late extra session

virtually censuring the Hon. Charles Sumner. It is intimated that the

action of these petitioners evinces a lack of appreciation of the

services of the soldiers of the Union, and that not to censure Charles

Sumner is to censure the volunteers of Massachusetts.

As a matter of fact, the petitioners express no opinion as to the policy

or expediency of the senator's proposition. Some may believe it not only

right in itself, but expedient and well-timed; others that it was

inexpedient or premature. None doubt that, sooner or later, the thing

which it contemplates must be done, if we are to continue a united

people. What they feel and insist upon is that the proposition is one

which implies no disparagement of the soldiers of Massachusetts and the

Union; that it neither receives nor merits the "unqualified condemnation

of the people" of the state; and that it furnishes no ground whatever for

legislative interference or censure. A single glance at the names of the

petitioners is a sufficient answer to the insinuation that they are

unmindful of that self-sacrifice and devotion, the marble and granite

memorials of which, dotting the state from the Merrimac to the

Connecticut, testify the gratitude of the loyal heart of Massachusetts.

I have seen no soldier yet who considered himself wronged or "insulted"

by the proposition. In point of fact the soldiers have never asked for

such censure of the brave and loyal statesman who was the bosom friend

and confidant of Secretary Stanton (the great war-minister, second, if at

all, only to Carnot) and of John A. Andrew, dear to the heart of every

Massachusetts soldier, and whose tender care and sympathy reached them

wherever they struggled or died for country and freedom. The proposal of

Senator Sumner, instead of being an "insult," was, in fact, the highest

compliment which could be paid to brave men; for it implied that they

cherished no vindictive hatred of fallen foes; that they were too proudly

secure of the love and gratitude of their countrymen to need above their

heads the flaunting blazon of their achievements; that they were as

magnanimous in peace and victory as they were heroic and patient through

the dark and doubtful arbitrament of war. As such they understand it. I

should be sorry to think there existed a single son of Massachusetts weak

enough to believe that his reputation and honor as a soldier needed this

censure of Charles Sumner. I have before me letters from men, ranking

from orderly sergeant to general, who have looked at death full in the

face on every battlefield where the flag of Massachusetts floated, and

they all thank me for my efforts to rescind this uncalled-for censure,

and pledge me their hearty support. They cordially indorse the noble

letter of Vice-President Wilson offering his signature to the petition

for rescinding the obnoxious resolutions; and if these resolutions are

not annulled, it will not be the fault of Massachusetts volunteers, but

rather of the mistaken zeal of men more familiar with the drill of the

caucus than with that of the camp.

I am no blind partisan of Charles Sumner. I have often differed from him

in opinion. I regretted deeply the position which he thought it his duty

to take during the late presidential campaign. He felt the atmosphere

about him thick and foul with corruption and bribery and greed; he saw

the treasury ringed about like Saturn with unscrupulous combinations and

corporations; and it is to be regretted more than wondered at if he

struck out wildly in his indignation, and that his blows fell sometimes

upon the wrong object. But I did not intend to act the part of his

apologist. The twenty years of his senatorial life are crowded with

memorials of his loyalty to truth and free dom and humanity, which will

be enduring as our history. He is no party to this movement, in which my

name has been more prominent than I could have wished, and no word of his

prompted or suggested it. From its inception to the present time he has

remained silent in his chamber of pain, waiting to bequeath, like the

testator of the dramatist,

"A fame by scandal untouched

To Memory and Time's old daughter Truth."

He can well afford to wait, and the issue of the present question before

our legislature is of far less consequence to him than to us. To use the

words of one who stood by him in the dark days of the Fugitive Slave Law,

the Chief Justice of the United States,--"Time and the wiser thought will

vindicate the illustrious statesman to whom Massachusetts, the country,

and humanity owe so much, but the state can ill afford the damage to its

own reputation which such a censure of such a man will inflict."

AMESBURY, 3d month, 8, 1873.

THE ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION OF 1833. (1874.)

In the gray twilight of a chill day of late November, forty years ago, a

dear friend of mine, residing in Boston, made his appearance at the old

farm-house in East Haverhill. He had been deputed by the abolitionists

of the city, William L. Garrison, Samuel E. Sewall, and others, to

inform me of my appointment as a delegate to the Convention about to be

held in Philadelphia for the formation of an American Anti-Slavery

Society, and to urge upon me the necessity of my attendance.

Few words of persuasion, however, were needed. I was unused to

travelling; my life had been spent on a secluded farm; and the journey,

mostly by stage-coach, at that time was really a formidable one.

Moreover, the few abolitionists were everywhere spoken against, their

persons threatened, and in some instances a price set on their heads by

Southern legislators. Pennsylvania was on the borders of slavery, and it

needed small effort of imagination to picture to one's self the breaking

up of the Convention and maltreatment of its members. This latter

consideration I do not think weighed much with me, although I was better

prepared for serious danger than for anything like personal indignity. I

had read Governor Trumbull's description of the tarring and feathering of

his hero MacFingal, when, after the application of the melted tar, the

feather-bed was ripped open and shaken over him, until

"Not Maia's son, with wings for ears,

Such plumes about his visage wears,

Nor Milton's six-winged angel gathers

Such superfluity of feathers,"

and I confess I was quite unwilling to undergo a martyrdom which my best

friends could scarcely refrain from laughing at. But a summons like that

of Garrison's bugle-blast could scarcely be unheeded by one who, from

birth and education, held fast the traditions of that earlier

abolitionism which, under the lead of Benezet and Woolman, had effaced

from the Society of Friends every vestige of slave-holding. I had thrown

myself, with a young man's fervid enthusiasm, into a movement which

commended itself to my reason and conscience, to my love of country, and

my sense of duty to God and my fellow-men. My first venture in

authorship was the publication, at my own expense, in the spring of 1833,

of a pamphlet entitled Justice and Expediency, on the moral and political

evils of slavery, and the duty of emancipation. Under such circumstances

I could not hesitate, but prepared at once for my journey. It was

necessary that I should start on the morrow, and the intervening time,

with a small allowance for sleep, was spent in providing for the care of

the farm and homestead during my absence.

So the next morning I took the stage for Boston, stopping at the ancient

hostelry known as the Eastern Stage Tavern; and on the day following, in

company with William Lloyd Garrison, I left for New York. At that city

we were joined by other delegates, among them David Thurston, a

Congregational minister from Maine. On our way to Philadelphia, we took,

as a matter of necessary economy, a second-class conveyance, and found

ourselves, in consequence, among rough and hilarious companions, whose

language was more noteworthy for strength than refinement. Our worthy

friend the clergyman bore it awhile in painful silence, but at last felt

it his duty to utter words of remonstrance and admonition. The leader of

the young roisterers listened with a ludicrous mock gravity, thanked him

for his exhortation, and, expressing fears that the extraordinary effort

had exhausted his strength, invited him to take a drink with him. Father

Thurston buried his grieved face in his cloak-collar, and wisely left the

young reprobates to their own devices.

On reaching Philadelphia, we at once betook, ourselves to the humble

dwelling on Fifth Street occupied by Evan Lewis, a plain, earnest man and

lifelong abolitionist, who had been largely interested in preparing the

way for the Convention. In one respect the time of our assembling seemed

unfavorable. The Society of Friends, upon whose cooperation we had

counted, had but recently been rent asunder by one of those unhappy

controversies which so often mark the decline of practical righteousness.

The martyr-age of the society had passed, wealth and luxury had taken the

place of the old simplicity, there was a growing conformity to the maxims

of the world in trade and fashion, and with it a corresponding

unwillingness to hazard respectability by the advocacy of unpopular

reforms. Unprofitable speculation and disputation on one hand, and a

vain attempt on the other to enforce uniformity of opinion, had

measurably lost sight of the fact that the end of the gospel is love, and

that charity is its crowning virtue. After a long and painful struggle

the disruption had taken place; the shattered fragments, under the name

of Orthodox and Hicksite, so like and yet so separate in feeling,

confronted each other as hostile sects, and

"Never either found another

To free the hollow heart from paining;

They stood aloof, the scars remaining,

Like cliffs that have been torn asunder

A dreary sea now flows between;

But neither rain, nor frost, nor thunder,

Can wholly do away, I ween,

The marks of that which once has been."

We found about forty members assembled in the parlors of our friend

Lewis, and, after some general conversation, Lewis Tappan was asked to

preside over an informal meeting, preparatory to the opening of the

Convention. A handsome, intellectual-looking man, in the prime of life,

responded to the invitation, and in a clear, well-modulated voice, the

firm tones of which inspired hope and confidence, stated the objects of

our preliminary council, and the purpose which had called us together, in

earnest and well-chosen words. In making arrangements for the

Convention, it was thought expedient to secure, if possible, the services

of some citizen of Philadelphia, of distinction and high social standing,

to preside over its deliberations. Looking round among ourselves in vain

for some titled civilian or doctor of divinity, we were fain to confess

that to outward seeming we were but "a feeble folk," sorely needing the

shield of a popular name. A committee, of which I was a member, was

appointed to go in search of a president of this description. We visited

two prominent gentlemen, known as friendly to emancipation and of high

social standing. They received us with the dignified courtesy of the old

school, declined our proposition in civil terms, and bowed us out with a

cool politeness equalled only by that of the senior Winkle towards the

unlucky deputation of Pickwick and his unprepossessing companions. As we

left their doors we could not refrain from smiling in each other's faces

at the thought of the small inducement our proffer of the presidency held

out to men of their class. Evidently our company was not one for

respectability to march through Coventry with.

On the following morning we repaired to the Adelphi Building, on Fifth

Street, below Walnut, which had been secured for our use. Sixty-two

delegates were found to be in attendance. Beriah Green, of the Oneida

(New York) Institute, was chosen president, a fresh-faced, sandy-haired,

rather common-looking man, but who had the reputation of an able and

eloquent speaker. He had already made himself known to us as a resolute

and self-sacrificing abolitionist. Lewis Tappan and myself took our

places at his side as secretaries, on the elevation at the west end of

the hall.

Looking over the assembly, I noticed that it was mainly composed of

comparatively young men, some in middle age, and a few beyond that

period. They were nearly all plainly dressed, with a view to comfort

rather than elegance. Many of the faces turned towards me wore a look of

expectancy and suppressed enthusiasm; all had the earnestness which might

be expected of men engaged in an enterprise beset with difficulty and

perhaps with peril. The fine, intellectual head of Garrison, prematurely

bald, was conspicuous; the sunny-faced young man at his side, in whom all

the beatitudes seemed to find expression, was Samuel J. May, mingling in

his veins the best blood of the Sewalls and Quincys,--a man so

exceptionally pure and large-hearted, so genial, tender, and loving, that

he could be faithful to truth and duty without making an enemy.

"The de'il wad look into his face,

And swear he couldna wrang him."

That tall, gaunt, swarthy man, erect, eagle-faced, upon whose somewhat

martial figure the Quaker coat seemed a little out of place, was Lindley

Coates, known in all eastern Pennsylvania as a stern enemy of slavery;

that slight, eager man, intensely alive in every feature and gesture, was

Thomas Shipley, who for thirty years had been the protector of the free

colored people of Philadelphia, and whose name was whispered reverently

in the slave cabins of Maryland as the friend of the black man, one of a

class peculiar to old Quakerism, who in doing what they felt to be duty,

and walking as the Light within guided them, knew no fear and shrank from

no sacrifice. Braver men the world has not known. Beside him, differing

in creed, but united with him in works of love and charity, sat Thomas

Whitson, of the Hicksite school of Friends, fresh from his farm in

Lancaster County, dressed in plainest homespun, his tall form surmounted

by a shock of unkempt hair, the odd obliquity of his vision contrasting

strongly with he clearness and directness of his spiritual insight.

Elizur Wright, the young professor of a Western college, who had lost his

place by his bold advocacy of freedom, with a look of sharp concentration

in keeping with an intellect keen as a Damascus blade, closely watched

the proceedings through his spectacles, opening his mouth only to speak

directly to the purpose. The portly form of Dr. Bartholomew Russell, the

beloved physician, from that beautiful land of plenty and peace which

Bayard Taylor has described in his Story of Kennett, was not to be

overlooked. Abolitionist in heart and soul, his house was known as the

shelter of runaway slaves, and no sportsman ever entered into the chase

with such zest as he did into the arduous and sometimes dangerous work of

aiding their escape and baffling their pursuers. The youngest man

present was, I believe, James Miller McKim, a Presbyterian minister from

Columbia, afterwards one of our most efficient workers. James Mott, E.

L. Capron, Arnold Buffum, and Nathan Winslow, men well known in the anti-

slavery agitation, were conspicuous members. Vermont sent down from her

mountains Orson S. Murray, a man terribly in earnest, with a zeal that

bordered on fanaticism, and who was none the more genial for the mob-

violence to which he had been subjected. In front of me, awakening

pleasant associations of the old homestead in Merrimac valley, sat my

first school-teacher, Joshua Coffin, the learned and worthy antiquarian

and historian of Newbury. A few spectators, mostly of the Hicksite

division of Friends, were present, in broad brims and plain bonnets,

among them Esther Moore and Lucretia Mott.

Committees were chosen to draft a constitution for a national Anti-

Slavery Society, nominate a list of officers, and prepare a declaration

of principles to be signed by the members. Dr. A. L. Cox of New York,

while these committees were absent, read something from my pen eulogistic

of William Lloyd Garrison; and Lewis Tappan and Amos A. Phelps, a

Congregational clergyman of Boston, afterwards one of the most devoted

laborers in the cause, followed in generous commendation of the zeal,

courage, and devotion of the young pioneer. The president, after calling

James McCrummell, one of the two or three colored members of the

Convention, to the chair, made some eloquent remarks upon those editors

who had ventured to advocate emancipation. At the close of his speech a

young man rose to speak, whose appearance at once arrested my attention.

I think I have never seen a finer face and figure, and his manner, words,

and bearing were in keeping. "Who is he?" I asked of one of the

Pennsylvania delegates. "Robert Purvis, of this city, a colored man,"

was the answer. He began by uttering his heart-felt thanks to the

delegates who had convened for the deliverance of his people. He spoke

of Garrison in terms of warmest eulogy, as one who had stirred the heart

of the nation, broken the tomblike slumber of the church, and compelled

it to listen to the story of the slave's wrongs. He closed by declaring

that the friends of colored Americans would not be forgotten. "Their

memories," he said, "will be cherished when pyramids and monuments shall

have crumbled in dust. The flood of time which is sweeping away the

refuge of lies is bearing on the advocates of our cause to a glorious

immortality."

The committee on the constitution made their report, which after

discussion was adopted. It disclaimed any right or intention of

interfering, otherwise than by persuasion and Christian expostulation,

with slavery as it existed in the states, but affirming the duty of

Congress to abolish it in the District of Columbia and territories, and

to put an end to the domestic slave-trade. A list of officers of the new

society was then chosen: Arthur Tappan of New York, president, and Elizur

Wright, Jr., William Lloyd Garrison, and A. L. Cox, secretaries. Among

the vice-presidents was Dr. Lord of Dartmouth College, then professedly

in favor of emancipation, but who afterwards turned a moral somersault, a

self-inversion which left him ever after on his head instead of his feet.

He became a querulous advocate of slavery as a divine institution, and

denounced woe upon the abolitionists for interfering with the will and

purpose of the Creator. As the cause of freedom gained ground, the poor

man's heart failed him, and his hope for church and state grew fainter

and fainter. A sad prophet of the evangel of slavery, he testified in

the unwilling ears of an unbelieving generation, and died at last

despairing of a world which seemed determined that Canaan should no

longer be cursed, nor Onesimus sent back to Philemon.

The committee on the declaration of principles, of which I was a member,

held a long session, discussing the proper scope and tenor of the

document. But little progress being made, it was finally decided to

entrust the matter to a sub-committee, consisting of William L.

Garrison, S. J. May, and myself; and after a brief consultation and

comparison of each other's views, the drafting of the important paper was

assigned to the former gentleman. We agreed to meet him at his lodgings

in the house of a colored friend early the next morning. It was still

dark when we climbed up to his room, and the lamp was still burning by

the light of which he was writing the last sentence of the declaration.

We read it carefully, made a few verbal changes, and submitted it to the

large committee, who unanimously agreed to report it to the Convention.

The paper was read to the Convention by Dr. Atlee, chairman of the

committee, and listened to with the profoundest interest.

Commencing with a reference to the time, fifty-seven years before, when,

in the same city of Philadelphia, our fathers announced to the world

their Declaration of Independence,--based on the self-evident truths of

human equality and rights,--and appealed to arms for its defence, it

spoke of the new enterprise as one "without which that of our fathers is

incomplete," and as transcending theirs in magnitude, solemnity, and

probable results as much "as moral truth does physical force." It spoke

of the difference of the two in the means and ends proposed, and of the

trifling grievances of our fathers compared with the wrongs and

sufferings of the slaves, which it forcibly characterized as unequalled

by any others on the face of the earth. It claimed that the nation was

bound to repent at once, to let the oppressed go free, and to admit them

to all the rights and privileges of others; because, it asserted, no man

has a right to enslave or imbrute his brother; because liberty is

inalienable; because there is no difference, in principle, between slave-

holding and man-stealing, which the law brands as piracy; and because no

length of bondage can invalidate man's claim to himself, or render slave

laws anything but "an audacious usurpation."

It maintained that no compensation should be given to planters

emancipating slaves, because that would be a surrender of fundamental

principles; "slavery is a crime, and is, therefore, not an article to be

sold;" because slave-holders are not just proprietors of what they claim;

because emancipation would destroy only nominal, not real property; and

because compensation, if given at all, should be given to the slaves.

It declared any "scheme of expatriation" to be "delusive, cruel, and

dangerous." It fully recognized the right of each state to legislate

exclusively on the subject of slavery within its limits, and conceded

that Congress, under the present national compact, had no right to

interfere; though still contending that it had the power, and should

exercise it, "to suppress the domestic slave-trade between the several

states," and "to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and in

those portions of our territory which the Constitution has placed under

its exclusive jurisdiction."

After clearly and emphatically avowing the principles underlying the

enterprise, and guarding with scrupulous care the rights of persons and

states under the Constitution, in prosecuting it, the declaration closed

with these eloquent words:--

We also maintain that there are, at the present time, the highest

obligations resting upon the people of the free states to remove slavery

by moral and political action, as prescribed in the Constitution of the

United States. They are now living under a pledge of their tremendous

physical force to fasten the galling fetters of tyranny upon the limbs of

millions in the Southern states; they are liable to be called at any

moment to suppress a general insurrection of the slaves; they authorize

the slave-owner to vote on three fifths of his slaves as property, and

thus enable him to perpetuate his oppression; they support a standing

army at the South for its protection; and they seize the slave who has

escaped into their territories, and send him back to be tortured by an

enraged master or a brutal driver. This relation to slavery is criminal

and full of danger. It must be broken up.

"These are our views and principles,--these our designs and measures.

With entire confidence in the overruling justice of God, we plant

ourselves upon the Declaration of Independence and the truths of divine

revelation as upon the everlasting rock.

"We shall organize anti-slavery societies, if possible, in every city,

town, and village in our land.

"We shall send forth agents to lift up the voice of remonstrance, of

warning, of entreaty and rebuke.

"We shall circulate unsparingly and extensively anti-slavery tracts and

periodicals.

"We shall enlist the pulpit and the press in the cause of the suffering

and the dumb.

"We shall aim at a purification of the churches from all participation in

the guilt of slavery.

"We shall encourage the labor of freemen over that of the slaves, by

giving a preference to their productions; and

"We shall spare no exertions nor means to bring the whole nation to

speedy repentance.

"Our trust for victory is solely in God. We may be personally defeated,

but our principles never. Truth, justice, reason, humanity, must and

will gloriously triumph. Already a host is coming up to the help of the

Lord against the mighty, and the prospect before us is full of

encouragement.

"Submitting this declaration to the candid examination of the people of

this country, and of the friends of liberty all over the world, we hereby

affix our signatures to it; pledging ourselves that, under the guidance

and by the help of Almighty God, we will do all that in us lies,

consistently with this declaration of our principles, to overthrow the

most execrable system of slavery that has ever been witnessed upon earth,

to deliver our land from its deadliest curse, to wipe out the foulest

stain which rests upon our national escutcheon, and to secure to the

colored population of the United States all the rights and privileges

which belong to them as men and as Americans, come what may to our

persons, our interests, or our reputations, whether we live to witness

the triumph of justice, liberty, and humanity, or perish untimely as

martyrs in this great, benevolent, and holy cause."

The reading of the paper was followed by a discussion which lasted

several hours. A member of the Society of Friends moved its immediate

adoption. "We have," he said, "all given it our assent: every heart here

responds to it. It is a doctrine of Friends that these strong and deep

impressions should be heeded." The Convention, nevertheless, deemed it

important to go over the declaration carefully, paragraph by paragraph.

During the discussion, one of the spectators asked leave to say a few

words. A beautiful and graceful woman, in the prime of life, with a face

beneath her plain cap as finely intellectual as that of Madame Roland,

offered some wise and valuable suggestions, in a clear, sweet voice, the

charm of which I have never forgotten. It was Lucretia Mott of

Philadelphia. The president courteously thanked her, and encouraged her

to take a part in the discussion. On the morning of the last day of our

session, the declaration, with its few verbal amendments, carefully

engrossed on parchment, was brought before the Convention. Samuel J. May

rose to read it for the last time. His sweet, persuasive voice faltered

with the intensity of his emotions as he repeated the solemn pledges of

the concluding paragraphs. After a season of silence, David Thurston of

Maine rose as his name was called by one of the secretaries, and affixed

his name to the document. One after another passed up to the platform,

signed, and retired in silence. All felt the deep responsibility of the

occasion the shadow and forecast of a life-long struggle rested upon

every countenance.

Our work as a Convention was now done. President Green arose to make the

concluding address. The circumstances under which it was uttered may

have lent it an impressiveness not its own; but as I now recall it, it

seems to me the most powerful and eloquent speech to which I have ever

listened. He passed in review the work that had been done, the

constitution of the new society, the declaration of sentiments, and the

union and earnestness which had marked the proceedings. His closing

words will never be forgotten by those who heard them:--

"Brethren, it has been good to be here. In this hallowed atmosphere I

have been revived and refreshed. This brief interview has more than

repaid me for all that I have ever suffered. I have here met congenial

minds; I have rejoiced in sympathies delightful to the soul. Heart has

beat responsive to heart, and the holy work of seeking to benefit the

outraged and despised has proved the most blessed employment.

"But now we must retire from these balmy influences and breathe another

atmosphere. The chill hoar-frost will be upon us. The storm and tempest

will rise, and the waves of persecution will dash against our souls. Let

us be prepared for the worst. Let us fasten ourselves to the throne of

God as with hooks of steel. If we cling not to Him, our names to that

document will be but as dust.

"Let us court no applause, indulge in no spirit of vain boasting. Let us

be assured that our only hope in grappling with the bony monster is in an

Arm that is stronger than ours. Let us fix our gaze on God, and walk in

the light of His countenance. If our cause be just--and we know it is--

His omnipotence is pledged to its triumph. Let this cause be entwined

around the very fibres of our hearts. Let our hearts grow to it, so that

nothing but death can sunder the bond."

He ceased, and then, amidst a silence broken only by the deep-drawn

breath of emotion in the assembly, lifted up his voice in a prayer to

Almighty God, full of fervor and feeling, imploring His blessing and

sanctification upon the Convention and its labors. And with the

solemnity of this supplication in our hearts we clasped hands in

farewell, and went forth each man to his place of duty, not knowing the

things that should befall us as individuals, but with a confidence, never

shaken by abuse and persecution, in the certain triumph of our cause.

KANSAS

Read at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the state of

Kansas.

BEAR CAMP HOUSE, WEST OSSIPEE, N. H.,

Eighth month, 29th, 1879.

To J. S. EMERY, R. MORROW, AND C. W. SMITH, COMMITTEE:

I HAVE received your invitation to the twenty-fifth anniversary

celebration of the first settlement of Kansas. It would give me great

pleasure to visit your state on an occasion of such peculiar interest,

and to make the acquaintance of its brave and self-denying pioneers, but

I have not health and strength for the journey. It is very fitting that

this anniversary should be duly recognized. No one of your sister states

has such a record as yours,--so full of peril and adventure, fortitude,

self-sacrifice, and heroic devotion to freedom. Its baptism of martyr

blood not only saved the state to liberty, but made the abolition of

slavery everywhere possible. Barber and Stillwell and Colpetzer and

their associates did not die in vain. All through your long, hard

struggle I watched the course of events in Kansas with absorbing

interest. I rejoiced, while I marvelled at the steady courage which no

danger could shake, at the firm endurance which outwearied the

brutalities of your slaveholding invaders, and at that fidelity to right

and duty which the seduction of immediate self-interest could not swerve,

nor the military force of a proslavery government overawe. All my

sympathies were with you in that stern trial of your loyalty to God and

humanity. And when, in the end, you had conquered peace, and the last of

the baffled border ruffians had left your territory, I felt that the doom

of the accursed institution was sealed, and that its abolition was but a

question of time. A state with such a record will, I am sure, be true to

its noble traditions, and will do all in its power to aid the victims of

prejudice and oppression who may be compelled to seek shelter within its

borders. I will not for a moment distrust the fidelity of Kansas to her

foundation principle. God bless and prosper her! Thanking you for the

kind terms of your invitation, I am, gentlemen, very truly your friend.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.

An Introduction to Oliver Johnson's "William Lloyd Garrison and his

Times."

(1879.)

I no not know that any word of mine can give additional interest to this

memorial of William Lloyd Garrison from the pen of one of his earliest

and most devoted friends, whose privilege it has been to share his

confidence and his labors for nearly half a century; but I cannot well

forego the opportunity afforded me to add briefly my testimony to the

tribute to the memory of the great Reformer, whose friendship I have

shared, and with whom I have been associated in a common cause from youth

to age.

My acquaintance with him commenced in boyhood. My father was a

subscriber to his first paper, the Free Press, and the humanitarian tone

of his editorials awakened a deep interest in our little household, which

was increased by a visit which he made us. When he afterwards edited the

Journal of the Times, at Bennington, Vt., I ventured to write him a

letter of encouragement and sympathy, urging him to continue his labors

against slavery, and assuring him that he could "do great things," an

unconscious prophecy which has been fulfilled beyond the dream of my

boyish enthusiasm. The friendship thus commenced has remained unbroken

through half a century, confirming my early confidence in his zeal and

devotion, and in the great intellectual and moral strength which he

brought to the cause with which his name is identified.

During the long and hard struggle in which the abolitionists were

engaged, and amidst the new and difficult questions and side-issues which

presented themselves, it could scarcely be otherwise than that

differences of opinion and action should arise among them. The leader

and his disciples could not always see alike. My friend, the author of

this book, I think, generally found himself in full accord with him,

while I often decidedly dissented. I felt it my duty to use my right of

citizenship at the ballot-box in the cause of liberty, while Garrison,

with equal sincerity, judged and counselled otherwise. Each acted under

a sense of individual duty and responsibility, and our personal relations

were undisturbed. If, at times, the great anti-slavery leader failed to

do justice to the motives of those who, while in hearty sympathy with his

hatred of slavery, did not agree with some of his opinions and methods,

it was but the pardonable and not unnatural result of his intensity of

purpose, and his self-identification with the cause he advocated; and,

while compelled to dissent, in some particulars, from his judgment of men

and measures, the great mass of the antislavcry people recognized his

moral leadership. The controversies of old and new organization,

nonresistance and political action, may now be looked upon by the parties

to them, who still survive, with the philosophic calmness which follows

the subsidence of prejudice and passion. We were but fallible men, and

doubtless often erred in feeling, speech, and action. Ours was but the

common experience of reformers in all ages.

"Never in Custom's oiled grooves

The world to a higher level moves,

But grates and grinds with friction hard

On granite bowlder and flinty shard.

Ever the Virtues blush to find

The Vices wearing their badge behind,

And Graces and Charities feel the fire

Wherein the sins of the age expire."

It is too late now to dwell on these differences. I choose rather, with

a feeling of gratitude to God, to recall the great happiness of laboring

with the noble company of whom Garrison was the central figure. I love

to think of him as he seemed to me, when in the fresh dawn of manhood he

sat with me in the old Haverhill farmhouse, revolving even then schemes

of benevolence; or, with cheery smile, welcoming me to his frugal meal of

bread and milk in the dingy Boston printing-room; or, as I found him in

the gray December morning in the small attic of a colored man, in

Philadelphia, finishing his night-long task of drafting his immortal

Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society; or, as I

saw him in the jail of Leverett Street, after his almost miraculous

escape from the mob, playfully inviting me to share the safe lodgings

which the state had provided for him; and in all the varied scenes and

situations where we acted together our parts in the great endeavor and

success of Freedom.

The verdict of posterity in his case may be safely anticipated. With the

true reformers and benefactors of his race he occupies a place inferior

to none other. The private lives of many who fought well the battles of

humanity have not been without spot or blemish. But his private

character, like his public, knew no dishonor. No shadow of suspicion

rests upon the white statue of a life, the fitting garland of which

should be the Alpine flower that symbolizes noble purity.

ANTI-SLAVERY ANNIVERSARY.

Read at the semi-centennial celebration of the American Anti-Slavery

Society at Philadelphia, on the 3d December, 1883.

OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, MASS.,

11th mo., 30, 1883.

I NEED not say how gladly I would be with you at the semi-centennial of

the American Anti-Slavery Society. I am, I regret to say, quite unable

to gratify this wish, and can only represent myself by a letter.

Looking back over the long years of half a century, I can scarcely

realize the conditions under which the convention of 1833 assembled.

Slavery was predominant. Like Apollyon in Pilgrim's Progress, it

"straddled over the whole breadth of the way." Church and state, press

and pulpit, business interests, literature, and fashion were prostrate at

its feet. Our convention, with few exceptions, was composed of men

without influence or position, poor and little known, strong only in

their convictions and faith in the justice of their cause. To onlookers

our endeavor to undo the evil work of two centuries and convert a nation

to the "great renunciation" involved in emancipation must have seemed

absurd in the last degree. Our voices in such an atmosphere found no

echo. We could look for no response but laughs of derision or the

missiles of a mob.

But we felt that we had the strength of truth on our side; we were right,

and all the world about us was wrong. We had faith, hope, and

enthusiasm, and did our work, nothing doubting, amidst a generation who

first despised and then feared and hated us. For myself I have never

ceased to be grateful to the Divine Providence for the privilege of

taking a part in that work.

And now for more than twenty years we have had a free country. No slave

treads its soil. The anticipated dangerous consequences of complete

emancipation have not been felt. The emancipated class, as a whole, have

done wisely, and well under circumstances of peculiar difficulty. The

masters have learned that cotton can be raised better by free than by

slave labor, and nobody now wishes a return to slave-holding. Sectional

prejudices are subsiding, the bitterness of the civil war is slowly

passing away. We are beginning to feel that we are one people, with no

really clashing interests, and none more truly rejoice in the growing

prosperity of the South than the old abolitionists, who hated slavery as

a curse to the master as well as to the slave.

In view of this commemorative semi-centennial occasion, many thoughts

crowd upon me; memory recalls vanished faces and voices long hushed. Of

those who acted with me in the convention fifty years ago nearly all have

passed into another state of being. We who remain must soon follow; we

have seen the fulfilment of our desire; we have outlived scorn and

persecution; the lengthening shadows invite us to rest. If, in looking

back, we feel that we sometimes erred through impatient zeal in our

contest with a great wrong, we have the satisfaction of knowing that we

were influenced by no merely selfish considerations. The low light of

our setting sun shines over a free, united people, and our last prayer

shall be for their peace, prosperity, and happiness.

RESPONSE TO THE CELEBRATION OF MY EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY

BY THE COLORED CITIZENS OF WASHINGTON D. C.

To R. H. TERRELL AND GEORGE W. WILLIAMS, ESQUIRES.

GENTLEMEN,--Among the great number of tokens of interest and good-will

which reached me on my birthday, none have touched me more deeply than

the proceedings of the great meeting of the colored citizens of the

nation's capital, of which you are the representatives. The resolutions

of that meeting came to me as the voice of millions of my fellow-

countrymen. That voice was dumb in slavery when, more than half a

century ago, I put forth my plea for the freedom of the slave.

It could not answer me from the rice swamp and cotton field, but now, God

be praised, it speaks from your great meeting in Washington and from all

the colleges and schools where the youth of your race are taught. I

scarcely expected then that the people for whom I pleaded would ever know

of my efforts in their behalf. I cannot be too thankful to the Divine

Providence that I have lived to hear their grateful response.

I stand amazed at the rapid strides which your people have made since

emancipation, at your industry, your acquisition of property and land,

your zeal for education, your self-respecting but unresentful attitude

toward those who formerly claimed to be your masters, your pathetic but

manly appeal for just treatment and recognition. I see in all this the

promise that the time is not far distant when, in common with the white

race, you will have the free, undisputed rights of American citizenship

in all parts of the Union, and your rightful share in the honors as well

as the protection of the government.

Your letter would have been answered sooner if it had been possible. I

have been literally overwhelmed with letters and telegrams, which, owing

to illness, I have been in a great measure unable to answer or even read.

I tender to you, gentlemen, and to the people you represent my heartfelt

thanks, and the assurance that while life lasts you will find me, as I

have been heretofore, under more difficult circumstances, your faithful

friend.

OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, MASS.,

first mo., 9, 1888.

REFORM AND POLITICS. UTOPIAN SCHEMES AND POLITICAL THEORISTS.

THERE is a large class of men, not in Europe alone, but in this country

also, whose constitutional conservatism inclines them to regard any

organic change in the government of a state or the social condition of

its people with suspicion and distrust. They admit, perhaps, the evils

of the old state of things; but they hold them to be inevitable, the

alloy necessarily mingled with all which pertains to fallible humanity.

Themselves generally enjoying whatever of good belongs to the political

or social system in which their lot is cast, they are disposed to look

with philosophic indifference upon the evil which only afflicts their

neighbors. They wonder why people are not contented with their

allotments; they see no reason for change; they ask for quiet and peace

in their day; being quite well satisfied with that social condition which

an old poet has quaintly described:--

"The citizens like pounded pikes;

The lesser feed the great;

The rich for food seek stomachs,

And the poor for stomachs meat."

This class of our fellow-citizens have an especial dislike of theorists,

reformers, uneasy spirits, speculators upon the possibilities of the

world's future, constitution builders, and believers in progress. They

are satisfied; the world at least goes well enough with them; they sit as

comfortable in it as Lafontaine's rat in the cheese; and why should those

who would turn it upside down come hither also? Why not let well enough

alone? Why tinker creeds, constitutions, and laws, and disturb the good

old-fashioned order of things in church and state? The idea of making

the world better and happier is to them an absurdity. He who entertains

it is a dreamer and a visionary, destitute of common sense and practical

wisdom. His project, whatever it may be, is at once pronounced to be

impracticable folly, or, as they are pleased to term it, _Utopian._

The romance of Sir Thomas More, which has long afforded to the

conservatives of church and state a term of contempt applicable to all

reformatory schemes and innovations, is one of a series of fabulous

writings, in which the authors, living in evil times and unable to

actualize their plans for the well-being of society, have resorted to

fiction as a safe means of conveying forbidden truths to the popular

mind. Plato's "Timaeus," the first of the series, was written after the

death of Socrates and the enslavement of the author's country. In this

are described the institutions of the Island of Atlantis,--the writer's

ideal of a perfect commonwealth. Xenophon, in his "Cyropaedia," has also

depicted an imaginary political society by overlaying with fiction

historical traditions. At a later period we have the "New Atlantis" of

Lord Bacon, and that dream of the "City of the Sun" with which Campanella

solaced himself in his long imprisonment.

The "Utopia" of More is perhaps the best of its class. It is the work of

a profound thinker, the suggestive speculations and theories of one who

could

"Forerun his age and race, and let

His feet millenniums hence be set

In midst of knowledge dreamed not yet."

Much of what he wrote as fiction is now fact, a part of the frame-work of

European governments, and the political truths of his imaginary state are

now practically recognized in our own democratic system. As might be

expected, in view of the times in which the author wrote, and the

exceedingly limited amount of materials which he found ready to his hands

for the construction of his social and political edifice, there is a want

of proportion and symmetry in the structure. Many of his theories are no

doubt impracticable and unsound. But, as a whole, the work is an

admirable one, striding in advance of the author's age, and prefiguring a

government of religious toleration and political freedom. The following

extract from it was doubtless regarded in his day as something worse than

folly or the dream of a visionary enthusiast:--

"He judged it wrong to lay down anything rashly, and seemed to doubt

whether these different forms of religion might not all come from God,

who might inspire men in a different manner, and be pleased with the

variety. He therefore thought it to be indecent and foolish for any man

to threaten and terrify another, to make him believe what did not strike

him as true."

Passing by the "Telemachus" of Fenelon, we come to the political romance

of Harrington, written in the time of Cromwell. "Oceana" is the name by

which the author represents England; and the republican plan of

government which he describes with much minuteness is such as he would

have recommended for adoption in case a free commonwealth had been

established. It deals somewhat severely with Cromwell's usurpation; yet

the author did not hesitate to dedicate it to that remarkable man, who,

after carefully reading it, gave it back to his daughter, Lady Claypole,

with the remark, full of characteristic bluntness, that "the gentleman

need not think to cheat him of his power and authority; for what he had

won with the sword he would never suffer himself to be scribbled out of."

Notwithstanding the liberality and freedom of his speculations upon

government and religion in his Utopia, it must be confessed that Sir

Thomas More, in after life, fell into the very practices of intolerance

and bigotry which he condemned. When in the possession of the great seal

under that scandal of kingship, Henry VIII., he gave his countenance to

the persecution of heretics. Bishop Burnet says of him, that he caused a

gentleman of the Temple to be whipped and put to the rack in his

presence, in order to compel him to discover those who favored heretical

opinions. In his Utopia he assailed the profession of the law with

merciless satire; yet the satirist himself finally sat upon the

chancellor's woolsack; and, as has been well remarked by Horace Smith,

"if, from this elevated seat, he ever cast his eyes back upon his past

life, he must have smiled at the fond conceit which could imagine a

permanent Utopia, when he himself, certainly more learned, honest, and

conscientious than the mass of men has ever been, could in the course of

one short life fall into such glaring and frightful rebellion against his

own doctrines."

Harrington, on the other hand, as became the friend of Milton and Marvel,

held fast, through good and evil report, his republican faith. He

published his work after the Restoration, and defended it boldly and ably

from the numerous attacks made upon it. Regarded as too dangerous an

enthusiast to be left at liberty, he was imprisoned at the instance of

Lord Chancellor Hyde, first in the Tower, and afterwards on the Island of

St. Nicholas, where disease and imprudent remedies brought on a partial

derangement, from which he never recovered.

Bernardin St. Pierre, whose pathetic tale of "Paul and Virginia" has

found admirers in every language of the civilized world, in a fragment,

entitled "Arcadia," attempted to depict an ideal republic, without

priest, noble, or slave, where all are so religious that each man is the

pontiff of his family, where each man is prepared to defend his country,

and where all are in such a state of equality that there are no such

persons as servants. The plan of it was suggested by his friend Rousseau

during their pleasant walking excursions about the environs of Paris, in

which the two enthusiastic philosophers, baffled by the evil passions and

intractable materials of human nature as manifested in existing society,

comforted themselves by appealing from the actual to the possible, from

the real to the imaginary. Under the chestnut-trees of the Bois de

Boulogne, through long summer days, the two friends, sick of the noisy

world about them, yet yearning to become its benefactors,--gladly

escaping from it, yet busy with schemes for its regeneration and

happiness,--at once misanthropes and philanthropists,--amused and solaced

themselves by imagining a perfect and simple state of society, in which

the lessons of emulation and selfish ambition were never to be taught;

where, on the contrary, the young were to obey their parents, and to

prefer father, mother, brother, sister, wife, and friend to themselves.

They drew beautiful pictures of a country blessed with peace, indus try,

and love, covered with no disgusting monuments of violence and pride and

luxury, without columns, triumphal arches, hospitals, prisons, or

gibbets; but presenting to view bridges over torrents, wells on the arid

plain, groves of fruit-trees, and houses of shelter for the traveller in

desert places, attesting everywhere the sentiment of humanity. Religion

was to speak to all hearts in the eternal language of Nature. Death was

no longer to be feared; perspectives of holy consolation were to open

through the cypress shadows of the tomb; to live or to die was to be

equally an object of desire.

The plan of the "Arcadia" of St. Pierre is simply this: A learned young

Egyptian, educated at Thebes by the priests of Osiris, desirous of

benefiting humanity, undertakes a voyage to Gaul for the purpose of

carrying thither the arts and religion of Egypt. He is shipwrecked on

his return in the Gulf of Messina, and lands upon the coast, where he is

entertained by an Arcadian, to whom he relates his adventures, and from

whom he receives in turn an account of the simple happiness and peace of

Arcadia, the virtues and felicity of whose inhabitants are beautifully

exemplified in the lives and conversation of the shepherd and his

daughter. This pleasant little prose poem closes somewhat abruptly.

Although inferior in artistic skill to "Paul and Virginia" or the "Indian

Cottage", there is not a little to admire in the simple beauty of its

pastoral descriptions. The closing paragraph reminds one of Bunyan's

upper chamber, where the weary pilgrim's windows opened to the sunrising

and the singing of birds:--

"Tyrteus conducted his guests to an adjoining chamber. It had a window

shut by a curtain of rushes, through the crevices of which the islands of

the Alpheus might be seen in the light of the moon. There were in this

chamber two excellent beds, with coverlets of warm and light wool.

"Now, as soon as Amasis was left alone with Cephas, he spoke with joy of

the delight and tranquillity of the valley, of the goodness of the

shepherd, and the grace of his young daughter, to whom he had seen none

worthy to be compared, and of the pleasure which he promised himself the

next day, at the festival on Mount Lyceum, of beholding a whole people as

happy as this sequestered family. Converse so delightful might have

charmed away the night without the aid of sleep, had they not been

invited to repose by the mild light of the moon shining through the

window, the murmuring wind in the leaves of the poplars, and the distant

noise of the Achelous, which falls roaring from the summit of Mount

Lyceum."

The young patrician wits of Athens doubtless laughed over Plato's ideal

republic. Campanella's "City of the Sun" was looked upon, no doubt, as

the distempered vision of a crazy state prisoner. Bacon's college, in

his "New Atlantis," moved the risibles of fat-witted Oxford. More's

"Utopia," as we know, gave to our language a new word, expressive of the

vagaries and dreams of fanatics and lunatics. The merciless wits,

clerical and profane, of the court of Charles II. regarded Harrington's

romance as a perfect godsend to their vocation of ridicule. The gay

dames and carpet knights of Versailles made themselves merry with the

prose pastoral of St. Pierre; and the poor old enthusiast went down to

his grave without finding an auditory for his lectures upon natural

society.

The world had its laugh over these romances. When unable to refute their

theories, it could sneer at the authors, and answer them to the

satisfaction of the generation in which they lived, at least by a general

charge of lunacy. Some of their notions were no doubt as absurd as those

of the astronomer in "Rasselas", who tells Imlac that he has for five

years possessed the regulation of the weather, and has got the secret of

making to the different nations an equal and impartial dividend of rain

and sunshine. But truth, even when ushered into the world through the

medium of a dull romance and in connection with a vast progeny of errors,

however ridiculed and despised at first, never fails in the end of

finding a lodging-place in the popular mind. The speculations of the

political theorists whom we have noticed have not all proved to be of

"such stuff

As dreams are made of, and their little life

Rounded with sleep."

They have entered into and become parts of the social and political

fabrics of Europe and America. The prophecies of imagination have been

fulfilled; the dreams of romance have become familiar realities.

What is the moral suggested by this record? Is it not that we should

look with charity and tolerance upon the schemes and speculations of the

political and social theorists of our day; that, if unprepared to venture

upon new experiments and radical changes, we should at least consider

that what was folly to our ancestors is our wisdom, and that another

generation may successfully put in practice the very theories which now

seem to us absurd and impossible? Many of the evils of society have been

measurably removed or ameliorated; yet now, as in the days of the

Apostle, "the creation groaneth and travaileth in pain;" and although

quackery and empiricism abound, is it not possible that a proper

application of some of the remedies proposed might ameliorate the general

suffering? Rejecting, as we must, whatever is inconsistent with or

hostile to the doctrines of Christianity, on which alone rests our hope

for humanity, it becomes us to look kindly upon all attempts to apply

those doctrines to the details of human life, to the social, political,

and industrial relations of the race. If it is not permitted us to

believe all things, we can at least hope them. Despair is infidelity and

death. Temporally and spiritually, the declaration of inspiration holds

good, "We are saved by hope."

PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS. (1851.)

BERNARDIN ST. PIERRE, in his Wishes of a Solitary, asks for his country

neither wealth, nor military glory, nor magnificent palaces and

monuments, nor splendor of court nobility, nor clerical pomp. "Rather,"

he says, "O France, may no beggar tread thy plains, no sick or suffering

man ask in vain for relief; in all thy hamlets may every young woman find

a lover and every lover a true wife; may the young be trained arightly

and guarded from evil; may the old close their days in the tranquil hope

of those who love God and their fellow-men."

We are reminded of the amiable wish of the French essayist--a wish even

yet very far from realization, we fear, in the empire of Napoleon III.--

by the perusal of two documents recently submitted to the legislature of

the State of Massachusetts. They indicate, in our view, the real glory

of a state, and foreshadow the coming of that time when Milton's

definition of a true commonwealth shall be no longer a prophecy, but the

description of an existing fact,--"a huge Christian personage, a mighty

growth and stature of an honest man, moved by the purpose of a love of

God and of mankind."

Some years ago, the Legislature of Massachusetts, at the suggestion of

several benevolent gentlemen whose attention had been turned to the

subject, appointed a commission to inquire into the condition of the

idiots of the Commonwealth, to ascertain their numbers, and whether

anything could be done in their behalf.

The commissioners were Dr. Samuel G. Howe, so well and honorably known

for his long and arduous labors in behalf of the blind, Judge Byington,

and Dr. Gilman Kimball. The burden of the labor fell upon the chairman,

who entered upon it with the enthusiasm, perseverance, and practical

adaptation of means to ends which have made him so efficient in his

varied schemes of benevolence. On the 26th of the second month, 1848, a

full report of the results of this labor was made to the Governor,

accompanied by statistical tables and minute details. One hundred towns

had been visited by the chairman or his reliable agent, in which five

hundred and seventy-five persons in a state of idiocy were discovered.

These were examined carefully in respect to their physical as well as

mental condition, no inquiry being omitted which was calculated to throw

light upon the remote or immediate causes of this mournful imperfection

in the creation of God. The proximate causes Dr. Howe mentions are to be

found in the state of the bodily organization, deranged and

disproportioned by some violation of natural law on the part of the

parents or remoter ancestors of the sufferers. Out of 420 cases of

idiocy, he had obtained information respecting the condition of the

progenitors of 359; and in all but four of these eases he found that one

or the other, or both, of their immediate progenitors had in some way

departed widely from the condition of health; they were scrofulous, or

predisposed to affections of the brain, and insanity, or had intermarried

with blood-relations, or had been intemperate, or guilty of sensual

excesses.

Of the 575 cases, 420 were those of idiocy from birth, and 155 of idiocy

afterwards. Of the born idiots, 187 were under twenty-five years of age,

and all but 13 seemed capable of improvement. Of those above twenty-five

years of age, 73 appeared incapable of improvement in their mental

condition, being helpless as children at seven years of age; 43 out of

the 420 seemed as helpless as children at two years of age; 33 were in

the condition of mere infants; and 220 were supported at the public

charge in almshouses. A large proportion of them were found to be given

over to filthy and loathsome habits, gluttony, and lust, and constantly

sinking lower towards the condition of absolute brutishness.

Those in private houses were found, if possible, in a still more

deplorable state. Their parents were generally poor, feeble in mind and

body, and often of very intemperate habits. Many of them seemed scarcely

able to take care of themselves, and totally unfit for the training of

ordinary children. It was the blind leading the blind, imbecility

teaching imbecility. Some instances of the experiments of parental

ignorance upon idiotic offspring, which fell under the observation of Dr.

Howe, are related in his report Idiotic children were found with their

heads covered over with cold poultices of oak-bark, which the foolish

parents supposed would tan the brain and harden it as the tanner does his

ox-hides, and so make it capable of retaining impressions and remembering

lessons. In other cases, finding that the child could not be made to

comprehend anything, the sagacious heads of the household, on the

supposition that its brain was too hard, tortured it with hot poultices

of bread and milk to soften it. Others plastered over their children's

heads with tar. Some administered strong doses of mercury, to "solder up

the openings" in the head and make it tight and strong. Others

encouraged the savage gluttony of their children, stimulating their

unnatural and bestial appetites, on the ground that "the poor creatures

had nothing else to enjoy but their food, and they should have enough of

that!"

In consequence of this report, the legislature, in the spring of 1848,

made an annual appropriation of twenty-five hundred dollars, for three

years, for the purpose of training and teaching ten idiot children, to be

selected by the Governor and Council. The trustees of the Asylum for the

Blind, under the charge of Dr. Howe, made arrangements for receiving

these pupils. The school was opened in the autumn of 1848; and its first

annual report, addressed to the Governor and printed by order of the

Senate, is now before us.

Of the ten pupils, it appears that not one had the usual command of

muscular motion,--the languid body obeyed not the service of the imbecile

will. Some could walk and use their limbs and hands in simple motions;

others could make only make slight use of their muscles; and two were

without any power of locomotion.

One of these last, a boy six years of age, who had been stupefied on the

day of his birth by the application of hot rum to his head, could

scarcely see or notice objects, and was almost destitute of the sense of

touch. He could neither stand nor sit upright, nor even creep, but would

lie on the floor in whatever position he was placed. He could not feed

himself nor chew solid food, and had no more sense of decency than an

infant. His intellect was a blank; he had no knowledge, no desires, no

affections. A more hopeless object for experiment could scarcely have

been selected.

A year of patient endeavor has nevertheless wrought a wonderful change in

the condition of this miserable being. Cold bathing, rubbing of the

limbs, exercise of the muscles, exposure to the air, and other appliances

have enabled him to stand upright, to sit at table and feed himself, and

chew his food, and to walk about with slight assistance. His habits are

no longer those of a brute; he observes decency; his eye is brighter; his

cheeks glow with health; his countenance, is more expressive of thought.

He has learned many words and constructs simple sentences; his affections

begin to develop; and there is every prospect that he will be so far

renovated as to be able to provide for himself in manhood.

In the case of another boy, aged twelve years, the improvement has been

equally remarkable. The gentleman who first called attention to him, in

a recent note to Dr. Howe, published in the report, thus speaks of his

present condition: "When I remember his former wild and almost frantic

demeanor when approached by any one, and the apparent impossibility of

communicating with him, and now see him standing in his class, playing

with his fellows, and willingly and familiarly approaching me, examining

what I gave him,--and when I see him already selecting articles named by

his teacher, and even correctly pronouncing words printed on cards,--

improvement does not convey the idea presented to my mind; it is

creation; it is making him anew."

All the pupils have more or less advanced. Their health and habits have

improved; and there is no reason to doubt that the experiment, at the

close of its three years, will be found to have been quite as successful

as its most sanguine projectors could have anticipated. Dr. Howe has

been ably seconded by an accomplished teacher, James B. Richards, who has

devoted his whole time to the pupils. Of the nature and magnitude of

their task, an idea may be formed only by considering the utter

listlessness of idiocy, the incapability of the poor pupil to fix his

attention upon anything, and his general want of susceptibility to

impressions. All his senses are dulled and perverted. Touch, hearing,

sight, smell, are all more or less defective. His gluttony is

unaccompanied with the gratification of taste,--the most savory viands

and the offal which he shares with the pigs equally satisfy him. His

mental state is still worse than his physical. Thought is painful and

irksome to him.

His teacher can only engage his attention by strenuous efforts, loud,

earnest tones, gesticulations and signs, and a constant presentation of

some visible object of bright color and striking form. The eye wanders,

and the spark of consciousness and intelligence which has been fanned

into momentary brightness darkens at the slightest relaxation of the

teacher's exertions. The names of objects presented to him must

sometimes be repeated hundreds of times before he can learn them. Yet

the patience and enthusiasm of the teacher are rewarded by a progress,

slow and unequal, but still marked and manifest. Step by step, often

compelled to turn back and go over the inch of ground he had gained, the

idiot is still creeping forward; and by almost imperceptible degrees his

sick, cramped, and prisoned spirit casts off the burden of its body of

death, breath as from the Almighty--is breathed into him, and he becomes

a living soul.

After the senses of the idiot are trained to take note

of their appropriate objects, the various perceptive faculties are next

to be exercised. The greatest possible number of facts are to be

gathered up through the medium of these faculties into the storehouse of

memory, from whence eventually the higher faculties of mind may draw the

material of general ideas. It has been found difficult, if not

impossible, to teach the idiot to read by the letters first, as in the

ordinary method; but while the varied powers of the three letters, h, a,

t, could not be understood by him, he could be made to comprehend the

complex sign of the word hat, made by uniting the three.

The moral nature of the idiot needs training and development as well as

his physical and mental. All that can be said of him is, that he has the

latent capacity for moral development and culture. Uninstructed and left

to himself, he has no ideas of regulated appetites and propensities, of

decency and delicacy of affection and social relations. The germs of

these ideas, which constitute the glory and beauty of humanity,

undoubtedly exist in him; but there can be no growth without patient and

persevering culture. Where this is afforded, to use the language of the

report, "the idiot may learn what love is, though he may not know the

word which expresses it; he may feel kindly affections while unable to

understand the simplest virtuous principle; and he may begin to live

acceptably to God before he has learned the name by which men call him."

In the facts and statistics presented in the report, light is shed upon

some of the dark pages of God's providence, and it is seen that the

suffering and shame of idiocy are the result of sin, of a violation of

the merciful laws of God and of the harmonies of His benign order. The

penalties which are ordained for the violators of natural laws are

inexorable and certain. For the transgressor of the laws of life there

is, as in the case of Esau, "no place for repentance, though he seek it

earnestly and with tears." The curse cleaves to him and his children.

In this view, how important becomes the subject of the hereditary

transmission of moral and physical disease and debility! and how

necessary it is that there should be a clearer understanding of, and a

willing obedience, at any cost, to the eternal law which makes the parent

the blessing or the curse of the child, giving strength and beauty, and

the capacity to know and do the will of God, or bequeathing

loathsomeness, deformity, and animal appetite, incapable of the

restraints of the moral faculties! Even if the labors of Dr. Howe and

his benevolent associates do not materially lessen the amount of present

actual evil and suffering in this respect, they will not be put forth in

vain if they have the effect of calling public attention to the great

laws of our being, the violation of which has made this goodly earth a

vast lazarhouse of pain and sorrow.

The late annual message of the Governor of Massachusetts invites our

attention to a kindred institution of charity. The chief magistrate

congratulates the legislature, in language creditable to his mind and

heart, on the opening of the Reform School for Juvenile Criminals,

established by an act of a previous legislature. The act provides that,

when any boy under sixteen years of age shall be convicted of crime

punishable by imprisonment other than such an offence as is punished by

imprisonment for life, he may be, at the discretion of the court or

justice, sent to the State Reform School, or sentenced to such

imprisonment as the law now provides for his offence. The school is

placed under the care of trustees, who may either refuse to receive a boy

thus sent there, or, after he has been received, for reasons set forth in

the act, may order him to be committed to prison under the previous penal

law of the state. They are also authorized to apprentice the boys, at

their discretion, to inhabitants of the Commonwealth. And whenever any

boy shall be discharged, either as reformed or as having reached the age

of twenty-one years, his discharge is a full release from his sentence.

It is made the duty of the trustees to cause the boys to be instructed in

piety and morality, and in branches of useful knowledge, in some regular

course of labor, mechanical, agricultural, or horticultural, and such

other trades and arts as may be best adapted to secure the amendment,

reformation, and future benefit of the boys. The class of offenders for

whom this act provides are generally the offspring of parents depraved by

crime or suffering from poverty and want,--the victims often of

circumstances of evil which almost constitute a necessity,--issuing from

homes polluted and miserable, from the sight and hearing of loathsome

impurities and hideous discords, to avenge upon society the ignorance,

and destitution, and neglect with which it is too often justly

chargeable. In 1846 three hundred of these youthful violators of law

were sentenced to jails and other places of punishment in Massachusetts,

where they incurred the fearful liability of being still more thoroughly

corrupted by contact with older criminals, familiar with atrocity, and

rolling their loathsome vices "as a sweet morsel under the tongue." In

view of this state of things the Reform School has been established,

twenty-two thousand dollars having been contributed to the state for that

purpose by an unknown benefactor of his race. The school is located in

Westboro', on a fine farm of two hundred acres. The buildings are in the

form of a square, with a court in the centre, three stories in front,

with wings. They are constructed with a degree of architectural taste,

and their site is happily chosen,--a gentle eminence, overlooking one of

the loveliest of the small lakes which form a pleasing feature in New

England scenery. From this place the atmosphere and associations of the

prison are excluded. The discipline is strict, as a matter of course;

but it is that of a well-regulated home or school-room,--order, neatness,

and harmony within doors; and without, the beautiful 'sights and sounds

and healthful influences of Nature. One would almost suppose that the

poetical dream of Coleridge, in his tragedy of Remorse, had found its

realization in the Westboro' School, and that, weary of the hopelessness

and cruelty of the old penal system, our legislators had embodied in

their statutes the idea of the poet:--

"With other ministrations thou, O Nature,

Healest thy wandering and distempered child

Thou pourest on him thy soft influences,

Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,

Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,

Till he relent, and can no more endure

To be a jarring and a dissonant thing

Amidst this general dance and minstrelsy."

Thus it is that the Christian idea of reformation, rather than revenge,

is slowly but surely incorporating itself in our statute books. We have

only to look back but a single century to be able to appreciate the

immense gain for humanity in the treatment of criminals which has been

secured in that space of time. Then the use of torture was common

throughout Europe. Inability to comprehend and believe certain religious

dogmas was a crime to be expiated by death, or confiscation of estate, or

lingering imprisonment. Petty offences against property furnished

subjects for the hangman. The stocks and the whipping-post stood by the

side of the meeting-house. Tongues were bored with redhot irons and ears

shorn off. The jails were loathsome dungeons, swarming with vermin,

unventilated, unwarmed. A century and a half ago the populace of

Massachusetts were convulsed with grim merriment at the writhings of a

miserable woman scourged at the cart-tail or strangling in the ducking-

stool; crowds hastened to enjoy the spectacle of an old man enduring the

unutterable torment of the 'peine forte et dare,'--pressed slowly to

death under planks,--for refusing to plead to an indictment for

witchcraft. What a change from all this to the opening of the State

Reform School, to the humane regulations of prisons and penitentiaries,

to keen-eyed benevolence watching over the administration of justice,

which, in securing society from lawless aggression, is not suffered to

overlook the true interest and reformation of the criminal, nor to forget

that the magistrate, in the words of the Apostle, is to be indeed "the

minister of God to man for good!"

LORD ASHLEY AND THE THIEVES.

"THEY that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick," was

the significant answer of our Lord to the self-righteous Pharisees who

took offence at his companions,--the poor, the degraded, the weak, and

the sinful. "Go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and

not sacrifice; for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to

repentance."

The great lesson of duty inculcated by this answer of the Divine Teacher

has been too long overlooked by individuals and communities professedly

governed by His maxims. The phylacteries of our modern Pharisees are as

broad as those of the old Jewish saints. The respectable Christian

detests his vicious and ill-conditioned neighbors as heartily as the

Israelite did the publicans and sinners of his day. He folds his robe of

self-righteousness closely about him, and denounces as little better than

sinful weakness all commiseration for the guilty; and all attempts to

restore and reclaim the erring violators of human law otherwise than by

pains and penalties as wicked collusion with crime, dangerous to the

stability and safety of society, and offensive in the sight of God. And

yet nothing is more certain than that, just in proportion as the example

of our Lord has been followed in respect to the outcast and criminal, the

effect has been to reform and elevate,--to snatch as brands from the

burning souls not yet wholly given over to the service of evil. The

wonderful influence for good exerted over the most degraded and reckless

criminals of London by the excellent and self-denying Elizabeth Fry, the

happy results of the establishment of houses of refuge, and reformation,

and Magdalen asylums, all illustrate the wisdom of Him who went about

doing good, in pointing out the morally diseased as the appropriate

subjects of the benevolent labors of His disciples. No one is to be

despaired of. We have no warrant to pass by any of our fellow-creatures

as beyond the reach of God's grace and mercy; for, beneath the most

repulsive and hateful outward manifestation, there is always a

consciousness of the beauty of goodness and purity, and of the

loathsomeness of sin,--one chamber of the heart as yet not wholly

profaned, whence at times arises the prayer of a burdened and miserable

spirit for deliverance. Deep down under the squalid exterior,

unparticipative in the hideous merriment and recklessness of the

criminal, there is another self,--a chained and suffering inner man,--

crying out, in the intervals of intoxication and brutal excesses, like

Jonah from the bosom of hell. To this lingering consciousness the

sympathy and kindness of benevolent and humane spirits seldom appeal in

vain; for, whatever may be outward appearances, it remains true that the

way of the transgressor is hard, and that sin and suffering are

inseparable. Crime is seldom loved or persevered in for its own sake;

but, when once the evil path is entered upon, a return is in reality

extremely difficult to the unhappy wanderer, and often seems as well nigh

impossible. The laws of social life rise up like insurmountable barriers

between him and escape. As he turns towards the society whose rights he

has outraged, its frown settles upon him; the penalties of the laws he

has violated await him; and he falls back despairing, and suffers the

fetters of the evil habit to whose power he has yielded himself to be

fastened closer and heavier upon him. O for some good angel, in the form

of a brother-man and touched with a feeling of his sins and infirmities,

to reassure his better nature and to point out a way of escape from its

body of death!

We have been led into these remarks by an account, given in the London

Weekly Chronicle, of a most remarkable interview between the professional

thieves of London and Lord Ashley,--a gentleman whose best patent of

nobility is to be found in his generous and untiring devotion to the

interests of his fellow-men. It appears that a philanthropic gentleman

in London had been applied to by two young thieves, who had relinquished

their evil practices and were obtaining a precarious but honest

livelihood by picking up bones and rags in the streets, their loss of

character closing against them all other employments. He had just been

reading an address of Lord Ashley's in favor of colonial emigration, and

he was led to ask one of the young men how he would like to emigrate.

"I should jump at the chance!" was the reply. Not long after the

gentleman was sent for to visit one of those obscure and ruinous courts

of the great metropolis where crime and poverty lie down together,--

localities which Dickens has pictured with such painful distinctness.

Here, to his surprise, he met a number of thieves and outlaws, who

declared themselves extremely anxious to know whether any hope could be

held out to them of obtaining an honest living, however humble, in the

colonies, as their only reason for continuing in their criminal course

was the impossibility of extricating themselves. He gave them such

advice and encouragement as he was able, and invited them to assemble

again, with such of their companions as they could persuade to do so, at

the room of the Irish Free School, for the purpose of meeting Lord

Ashley. On the 27th of the seventh month last the meeting took place.

At the hour appointed, Lord Ashley and five or six other benevolent

gentlemen, interested in emigration as a means of relief and reformation

to the criminal poor, entered the room, which was already well-nigh

filled. Two hundred and seven professed thieves were present. "Several

of the most experienced thieves were stationed at the door to prevent the

admission of any but thieves. Some four or five individuals, who were

not at first known, were subjected to examination, and only allowed to

remain on stating that they were, and being recognized as, members of the

dishonest fraternity; and before the proceedings of the evening commenced

the question was very carefully put, and repeated several times, whether

any one was in the room of whom others entertained doubts as to who he

was. The object of this care was, as so many of them were in danger of

'getting into trouble,' or, in other words, of being taken up for their

crimes, to ascertain if any who might betray them were present; and

another intention of this scrutiny was, to give those assembled, who

naturally would feel considerable fear, a fuller confidence in opening

their minds."

What a novel conference between the extremes of modern society! All that

is beautiful in refinement and education, moral symmetry and Christian

grace, contrasting with the squalor, the ignorance, the lifelong

depravity of men living "without God in the world,"--the pariahs of

civilization,--the moral lepers, at the sight of whom decency covers its

face, and cries out, "Unclean!" After a prayer had been offered, Lord

Ashley spoke at considerable length, making a profound impression on his

strange auditory as they listened to his plans of emigration, which

offered them an opportunity to escape from their miserable condition and

enter upon a respectable course of life. The hard heart melted and the

cold and cruel eye moistened. With one accord the wretched felons

responded to the language of Christian love and good-will, and declared

their readiness to follow the advice of their true friend. They looked

up to him as to an angel of mercy, and felt the malignant spirits which

had so long tormented them disarmed of all power of evil in the presence

of simple goodness. He stood in that felon audience like Spenser's Una

amidst the satyrs; unassailable and secure in the "unresistible might of

meekness," and panoplied in that "noble grace which dashed brute violence

with sudden adoration and mute awe."

Twenty years ago, when Elizabeth Fry ventured to visit those "spirits in

prison,"--the female tenants of Newgate,--her temerity was regarded with

astonishment, and her hope of effecting a reformation in the miserable

objects of her sympathy was held to be wholly visionary. Her personal

safety and the blessed fruits of her labors, nevertheless, confirmed the

language of her Divine Master to His disciples when He sent them forth as

lambs among wolves: "Behold, I give unto you power over all the power of

the enemy." The still more unpromising experiment of Lord Ashley, thus

far, has been equally successful; and we hail it as the introduction of a

new and more humane method of dealing with the victims of sin and

ignorance, and the temptations growing out of the inequalities and vices

of civilization.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

Letter to the Newport Convention.

AMESBURY, MASS., 12th, 8th Month, 1869.

I HAVE received thy letter inviting me to attend the Convention in behalf

of Woman's Suffrage, at Newport, R. I., on the 25th inst. I do not see

how it is possible for me to accept the invitation; and, were I to do so,

the state of my health would prevent me from taking such a part in the

meeting as would relieve me from the responsibility of seeming to

sanction anything in its action which might conflict with my own views of

duty or policy. Yet I should do myself great injustice if I did not

embrace this occasion to express my general sympathy with the movement.

I have seen no good reason why mothers, wives, and daughters should not

have the same right of person, property, and citizenship which fathers,

husbands, and brothers have.

The sacred memory of mother and sister; the wisdom and dignity of women

of my own religious communion who have been accustomed to something like

equality in rights as well as duties; my experience as a co-worker with

noble and self-sacrificing women, as graceful and helpful in their

household duties as firm and courageous in their public advocacy of

unpopular truth; the steady friendships which have inspired and

strengthened me, and the reverence and respect which I feel for human

nature, irrespective of sex, compel me to look with something more than

acquiescence on the efforts you are making. I frankly confess that I am

not able to forsee all the consequences of the great social and political

change proposed, but of this I am, at least, sure, it is always safe to

do right, and the truest expediency is simple justice. I can understand,

without sharing, the misgivings of those who fear that, when the vote

drops from woman's hand into the ballot-box, the beauty and sentiment,

the bloom and sweetness, of womankind will go with it. But in this

matter it seems to me that we can trust Nature. Stronger than statutes

or conventions, she will be conservative of all that the true man loves

and honors in woman. Here and there may be found an equivocal, unsexed

Chevalier D'Eon, but the eternal order and fitness of things will remain.

I have no fear that man will be less manly or woman less womanly when

they meet on terms of equality before the law.

On the other hand, I do not see that the exercise of the ballot by woman

will prove a remedy for all the evils of which she justly complains. It

is her right as truly as mine, and when she asks for it, it is something

less than manhood to withhold it. But, unsupported by a more practical

education, higher aims, and a deeper sense of the responsibilities of

life and duty, it is not likely to prove a blessing in her hands any more

than in man's.

With great respect and hearty sympathy, I am very truly thy friend.

ITALIAN UNITY

AMESBURY, MASS., 1st Mo., 4th, 1871.

Read at the great meeting in New York, January, 1871, in celebration

of the freedom of Rome and complete unity of Italy.

IT would give me more than ordinary satisfaction to attend the meeting on

the 12th instant for the celebration of Italian Unity, the emancipation

of Rome, and its occupation as the permanent capital of the nation.

For many years I have watched with deep interest and sympathy the popular

movement on the Italian peninsula, and especially every effort for the

deliverance of Rome from a despotism counting its age by centuries. I

looked at these struggles of the people with little reference to their

ecclesiastical or sectarian bearings. Had I been a Catholic instead of a

Protestant, I should have hailed every symptom of Roman deliverance from

Papal rule, occupying, as I have, the standpoint of a republican radical,

desirous that all men, of all creeds, should enjoy the civil liberty

which I prized so highly for myself.

I lost all confidence in the French republic of 1849, when it forfeited

its own right to exist by crushing out the newly formed Roman republic

under Mazzini and Garibaldi. From that hour it was doomed, and the

expiation of its monstrous crime is still going on. My sympathies are

with Jules Favre and Leon Gambetta in their efforts to establish and

sustain a republic in France, but I confess that the investment of Paris

by King William seems to me the logical sequence of the bombardment of

Rome by Oudinot. And is it not a significant fact that the terrible

chassepot, which made its first bloody experiment upon the halfarmed

Italian patriots without the walls of Rome, has failed in the hands of

French republicans against the inferior needle-gun of Prussia? It was

said of a fierce actor in the old French Revolution that he demoralized

the guillotine. The massacre at Mentana demoralized the chassepot.

It is a matter of congratulation that the redemption of Rome has been

effected so easily and bloodlessly. The despotism of a thousand years

fell at a touch in noiseless rottenness. The people of Rome, fifty to

one, cast their ballots of condemnation like so many shovelfuls of earth

upon its grave. Outside of Rome there seems to be a very general

acquiescence in its downfall. No Peter the Hermit preaches a crusade in

its behalf. No one of the great Catholic powers of Europe lifts a finger

for it. Whatever may be the feelings of Isabella of Spain and the

fugitive son of King Bomba, they are in no condition to come to its

rescue. It is reserved for American ecclesiastics, loud-mouthed in

professions of democracy, to make solemn protest against what they call

an "outrage," which gives the people of Rome the right of choosing their

own government, and denies the divine right of kings in the person of Pio

Nono.

The withdrawal of the temporal power of the Pope will prove a blessing to

the Catholic Church, as well as to the world. Many of its most learned

and devout priests and laymen have long seen the necessity of such a

change, which takes from it a reproach and scandal that could no longer

be excused or tolerated. A century hence it will have as few apologists

as the Inquisition or the massacre of St. Bartholomew.

In this hour of congratulation let us not forget those whose suffering

and self-sacrifice, in the inscrutable wisdom of Providence, prepared the

way for the triumph which we celebrate. As we call the long, illustrious

roll of Italian patriotism--the young, the brave, and beautiful; the

gray-haired, saintly confessors; the scholars, poets, artists, who, shut

out from human sympathy, gave their lives for God and country in the

slow, dumb agony of prison martyrdom--let us hope that they also rejoice

with us, and, inaudible to earthly ears, unite in our thanksgiving:

"Alleluia! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! He hath avenged the

blood of his servants!"

In the belief that the unity of Italy and the overthrow of Papal rule

will strengthen the cause of liberty throughout the civilized' world, I

am very truly thy friend.

INDIAN CIVILIZATION.

THE present condition and future prospects of the remnants of the

aboriginal inhabitants of this continent can scarcely be a matter of

indifference to any class of the people of the United States. Apart from

all considerations of justice and duty, a purely selfish regard to our

own well-being would compel attention to the subject. The irreversible

laws of God's moral government, and the well-attested maxims of political

and social economy, leave us in no doubt that the suffering, neglect, and

wrong of one part of the community must affect all others. A common

responsibility rests upon each and all to relieve suffering, enlighten

ignorance, and redress wrong, and the penalty of neglect in this respect

no nation has ever escaped.

It is only within a comparatively recent period that the term Indian

Civilization could be appropriately used in this country. Very little

real progress bad been made in this direction, up to the time when

Commissioner Lang in 1844 visited the tribes now most advanced. So

little had been done, that public opinion had acquiesced in the

assumption that the Indians were not susceptible of civilization and

progress. The few experiments had not been calculated to assure a

superficial observer.

The unsupported efforts of Elliot in New England were counteracted by the

imprisonment, and in some instances the massacre of his "praying

Indians," by white men under the exasperation of war with hostile tribes.

The salutary influence of the Moravians and Friends in Pennsylvania was

greatly weakened by the dreadful massacre of the unarmed and blameless

converts of Gnadenhutten. But since the first visit of Commissioner

Lang, thirty-three years ago, the progress of education, civilization,

and conversion to Christianity, has been of a most encouraging nature,

and if Indian civilization was ever a doubtful problem, it has been

practically solved.

The nomadic habits and warlike propensities of the native tribes are

indeed formidable but not insuperable difficulties in the way of their

elevation. The wildest of them may compare not unfavorably with those

Northern barbarian hordes that swooped down upon Christian Europe, and

who were so soon the docile pupils and proselytes of the peoples they had

conquered. The Arapahoes and Camanches of our day are no further removed

from the sweetness and light of Christian culture than were the

Scandinavian Sea Kings of the middle centuries, whose gods were patrons

of rapine and cruelty, their heaven a vast, cloud-built ale-house, where

ghostly warriors drank from the skulls of their victims, and whose hell

was a frozen horror of desolation and darkness, to be avoided only by

diligence in robbery and courage in murder. The descendants of these

human butchers are now among the best exponents of the humanizing

influence of the gospel of Christ. The report of the Superintendent of

the remnants of the once fierce and warlike Six Nations, now peaceable

and prosperous in Canada, shows that the Indian is not inferior to the

Norse ancestors of the Danes and Norwegians of our day in capability of

improvement.

It is scarcely necessary to say, what is universally conceded, that the

wars waged by the Indians against the whites have, in nearly every

instance, been provoked by violations of solemn treaties and systematic

disregard of their rights of person, property, and life. The letter of

Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota, to the New York Tribune of second month,

1877, calls attention to the emphatic language of Generals Sherman,

Harney, Terry, and Augur, written after a full and searching

investigation of the subject: "That the Indian goes to war is not

astonishing: he is often compelled to do so: wrongs are borne by him in

silence, which never fail to drive civilized men to deeds of violence.

The best possible way to avoid war is to do no injustice."

It is not difficult to understand the feelings of the unfortunate pioneer

settlers on the extreme borders of civilization, upon whom the blind

vengeance of the wronged and hunted Indians falls oftener than upon the

real wrong-doers. They point to terrible and revolting cruelties as

proof that nothing short of the absolute extermination of the race can

prevent their repetition. But a moment's consideration compels us to

admit that atrocious cruelty is not peculiar to the red man. "All wars

are cruel," said General Sherman, and for eighteen centuries Christendom

has been a great battle-field. What Indian raid has been more dreadful

than the sack of Magdeburg, the massacre of Glencoe, the nameless

atrocities of the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, the murders of St.

Bartholomew's day, the unspeakable agonies of the South of France under

the demoniac rule of revolution! All history, black with crime and red

with blood, is but an awful commentary upon "man's inhumanity to man,"

and it teaches us that there is nothing exceptional in the Indian's

ferocity and vindictiveness, and that the alleged reasons for his

extermination would, at one time or another, have applied with equal

force to the whole family of man.

A late lecture of my friend, Stanley Pumphrey, comprises more of valuable

information and pertinent suggestions on the Indian question than I have

found in any equal space; and I am glad of the opportunity to add to it

my hearty endorsement, and to express the conviction that its general

circulation could not fail to awaken a deeper and more kindly interest in

the condition of the red man, and greatly aid in leading the public mind

to a fuller appreciation of the responsibility which rests upon us as a

people to rectify, as far as possible, past abuses, and in our future

relations to the native owners of the soil to "deal justly and love

mercy."

READING FOR THE BLIND. (1880.)

To Mary C. Moore, teacher in the Perkins Asylum.

DEAR FRIEND,--It gives me great pleasure to know that the pupils in thy

class at the Institution for the Blind have the opportunity afforded them

to read through the sense of touch some of my writings, and thus hold

what I hope will prove a pleasant communion with me. Very glad I shall

be if the pen-pictures of nature, and homely country firesides, which I

have tried to make, are understood and appreciated by those who cannot

discern them by natural vision. I shall count it a great privilege to

see for them, or rather to let them see through my eyes. It is the mind

after all that really sees, shapes, and colors all things. What visions

of beauty and sublimity passed before the inward and spiritual sight of

blind Milton and Beethoven!

I have an esteemed friend, Morrison Hendy, of Kentucky, who is deaf and

blind; yet under these circumstances he has cultivated his mind to a high

degree, and has written poems of great beauty, and vivid descriptions of

scenes which have been witnessed only by the "light within."

I thank thee for thy letter, and beg of thee to assure the students that

I am deeply interested in their welfare and progress, and that my prayer

is that their inward and spiritual eyes may become so clear that they can

well dispense with the outward and material ones.

THE INDIAN QUESTION.

Read at the meeting in Boston, May, 1883, for the consideration of the

condition of the Indians in the United States.

AMESBURY, 4th mo., 1883.

I REGRET that I cannot be present at the meeting called in reference to

the pressing question of the day, the present condition and future

prospects of the Indian race in the United States. The old policy,

however well intended, of the government is no longer available. The

westward setting tide of immigration is everywhere sweeping over the

lines of the reservations. There would seem to be no power in the

government to prevent the practical abrogation of its solemn treaties and

the crowding out of the Indians from their guaranteed hunting grounds.

Outbreaks of Indian ferocity and revenge, incited by wrong and robbery on

the part of the whites, will increasingly be made the pretext of

indiscriminate massacres. The entire question will soon resolve itself

into the single alternative of education and civilization or

extermination.

The school experiments at Hampton, Carlisle, and Forest Grove in Oregon

have proved, if such proof were ever needed, that the roving Indian can

be enlightened and civilized, taught to work and take interest and

delight in the product of his industry, and settle down on his farm or in

his workshop, as an American citizen, protected by and subject to the

laws of the republic. What is needed is that not only these schools

should be more liberally supported, but that new ones should be opened

without delay. The matter does not admit of procrastination. The work

of education and civilization must be done. The money needed must be

contributed with no sparing hand. The laudable example set by the

Friends and the American Missionary Association should be followed by

other sects and philanthropic societies. Christianity, patriotism, and

enlightened self interest have a common stake in the matter. Great and

difficult as the work may be the country is strong enough, rich enough,

wise enough, and, I believe, humane and Christian enough to do it.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

Read at a meeting of the Essex Club, in Boston,

November, 1885.

AMESBURY, 11th Mo., 10, 1885.

I AM sorry that I cannot accept thy invitation to attend the meeting of

the Essex Club on the 14th inst. I should be glad to meet my old

Republican friends and congratulate them on the results of the election

in Massachusetts, and especially in our good old county of Essex.

Some of our friends and neighbors, who have been with us heretofore, last

year saw fit to vote with the opposite party. I would be the last to

deny their perfect right to do so, or to impeach their motives, but I

think they were mistaken in expecting that party to reform the abuses and

evils which they complained of. President Cleveland has proved himself

better than his party, and has done and said some good things which I

give him full credit for, but the instincts of his party are against him,

and must eventually prove too strong for him, and, instead of his

carrying the party, it will be likely to carry him. It has already

compelled him to put his hands in his pockets for electioneering

purposes, and travel all the way from Washington to Buffalo to give his

vote for a spoilsman and anti-civil service machine politician. I would

not like to call it a case of "offensive partisanship," but it looks a

good deal like it.

As a Republican from the outset, I am proud of the noble record of the

party, but I should rejoice to see its beneficent work taken up by the

Democratic party and so faithfully carried on as to make our organization

no longer necessary. But, as far as we can see, the Republican party has

still its mission and its future. When labor shall everywhere have its

just reward, and the gains of it are made secure to the earners; when

education shall be universal, and, North and South, all men shall have

the free and full enjoyment of civil rights and privileges, irrespective

of color or former condition; when every vice which debases the community

shall be discouraged and prohibited, and every virtue which elevates it

fostered and strengthened; when merit and fitness shall be the conditions

of office; and when sectional distrust and prejudice shall give place to

well-merited confidence in the loyalty and patriotism of all, then will

the work of the Republican party, as a party, be ended, and all political

rivalries be merged in the one great party of the people, with no other

aim than the common welfare, and no other watchwords than peace, liberty,

and union. Then may the language which Milton addressed to his

countrymen two centuries ago be applied to the United States, "Go on,

hand in hand, O peoples, never to be disunited; be the praise and heroic

song of all posterity. Join your invincible might to do worthy and

godlike deeds; and then he who seeks to break your Union, a cleaving

curse be his inheritance."

OUR DUMB RELATIONS. (1886.)

IT was said of St. Francis of Assisi, that he had attained, through the

fervor of his love, the secret of that deep amity with God and His

creation which, in the language of inspiration, makes man to be in league

with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field to be at peace

with him. The world has never been without tender souls, with whom the

golden rule has a broader application than its letter might seem to

warrant. The ancient Eastern seers recognized the rights of the brute

creation, and regarded the unnecessary taking of the life of the humblest

and meanest as a sin; and in almost all the old religions of the world

there are legends of saints, in the depth of whose peace with God and

nature all life was sacredly regarded as the priceless gift of heaven,

and who were thus enabled to dwell safely amidst lions and serpents.

It is creditable to human nature and its unperverted instincts that

stories and anecdotes of reciprocal kindness and affection between men

and animals are always listened to with interest and approval. How

pleasant to think of the Arab and his horse, whose friendship has been

celebrated in song and romance. Of Vogelwied, the Minnesinger, and his

bequest to the birds. Of the English Quaker, visited, wherever he went,

by flocks of birds, who with cries of joy alighted on his broad-brimmed

hat and his drab coat-sleeves. Of old Samuel Johnson, when half-blind

and infirm, groping abroad of an evening for oysters for his cat. Of

Walter Scott and John Brown, of Edinburgh, and their dogs. Of our own

Thoreau, instinctively recognized by bird and beast as a friend. Emerson

says of him: "His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Fuller

records of Butler, the apologist, that either he had told the bees

things, or the bees had told him. Snakes coiled round his legs; the

fishes swam into his hand; he pulled the woodchuck out of his hole by his

tail, and took foxes under his protection from the hunters."

In the greatest of the ancient Hindu poems--the sacred book of the

Mahabharata--there is a passage of exceptional beauty and tenderness,

which records the reception of King Yudishthira at the gate of Paradise.

A pilgrim to the heavenly city, the king had travelled over vast spaces,

and, one by one, the loved ones, the companions of his journey, had all

fallen and left him alone, save his faithful dog, which still followed.

He was met by Indra, and invited to enter the holy city. But the king

thinks of his friends who have fallen on the way, and declines to go in

without them. The god tells him they are all within waiting for him.

Joyful, he is about to seek them, when he looks upon the poor dog, who,

weary and wasted, crouches at his feet, and asks that he, too, may enter

the gate. Indra refuses, and thereupon the king declares that to abandon

his faithful dumb friend would be as great a sin as to kill a Brahmin.

"Away with that felicity whose price is to abandon the faithful!

Never, come weal or woe, will I leave my faithful dog.

The poor creature, in fear and distress, has trusted in my power to

save him;

Not, therefore, for life itself, will I break my plighted word."

In full sight of heaven he chooses to go to hell with his dog, and

straightway descends, as he supposes, thither. But his virtue and

faithfulness change his destination to heaven, and he finds himself

surrounded by his old friends, and in the presence of the gods, who thus

honor and reward his humanity and unselfish love.

INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION.

Read at the reception in Boston of the English delegation representing

more than two hundred members of the British Parliament who favor

international arbitration.

AMESBURY, 11th Mo., 9, 1887.

IT is a very serious disappointment to me not to be able to be present at

the welcome of the American Peace Society to the delegation of more than

two hundred members of the British Parliament who favor international

arbitration. Few events have more profoundly impressed me than the

presentation of this peaceful overture to the President of the United

States. It seems to me that every true patriot who seeks the best

interests of his country and every believer in the gospel of Christ must

respond to the admirable address of Sir Lyon Playfair and that of his

colleagues who represented the workingmen of England. We do not need to

be told that war is always cruel, barbarous, and brutal; whether used by

professed Christians with ball and bayonet, or by heathen with club and

boomerang. We cannot be blind to its waste of life and treasure and the

demoralization which follows in its train; nor cease to wonder at the

spectacle of Christian nations exhausting all their resources in

preparing to slaughter each other, with only here and there a voice, like

Count Tolstoi's in the Russian wilderness, crying in heedless ears that

the gospel of Christ is peace, not war, and love, not hatred.

The overture which comes to us from English advocates of arbitration is a

cheering assurance that the tide of sentiment is turning in favor of

peace among English speaking peoples. I cannot doubt that whatever stump

orators and newspapers may say for party purposes, the heart of America

will respond to the generous proposal of our kinsfolk across the water.

No two nations could be more favorably conditioned than England and the

United States for making the "holy experiment of arbitration."

In our associations and kinship, our aims and interests, our common

claims in the great names and achievements of a common ancestry, we are

essentially one people. Whatever other nations may do, we at least

should be friends. God grant that the noble and generous attempt shall

not be in vain! May it hasten the time when the only rivalry between us

shall be the peaceful rivalry of progress and the gracious interchange of

good.

"When closer strand shall lean to strand,

Till meet beneath saluting flags,

The eagle of our mountain crags,

The lion of our mother land!"

SUFFRAGE FOR WOMEN.

Read at the Woman's Convention at Washington.

OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, MASS., Third Mo., 8, 1888.

I THANK thee for thy kind letter. It would be a great satisfaction to be

able to be present at the fortieth anniversary of the Woman's Suffrage

Association. But, as that is not possible, I can only reiterate my

hearty sympathy with the object of the association, and bid it take heart

and assurance in view of all that has been accomplished. There is no

easy royal road to a reform of this kind, but if the progress has been

slow there has been no step backward. The barriers which at first seemed

impregnable in the shape of custom and prejudice have been undermined and

their fall is certain. A prophecy of your triumph at no distant day is

in the air; your opponents feel it and believe it. They know that yours

is a gaining and theirs a losing cause. The work still before you

demands on your part great patience, steady perseverance, a firm,

dignified, and self-respecting protest against the injustice of which you

have so much reason to complain, and of serene confidence which is not

discouraged by temporary checks, nor embittered by hostile criticism, nor

provoked to use any weapons of retort, which, like the boomerang, fall

back on the heads of those who use them. You can afford

in your consciousness of right to be as calm and courteous as the

archangel Michael, who, we are told in Scripture in his controversy with

Satan himself, did not bring a railing accusation against him. A wise

adaptation of means to ends is no yielding of principle, but care should

be taken to avoid all such methods as have disgraced political and

religious parties of the masculine sex. Continue to make it manifest

that all which is pure and lovely and of good repute in womanhood is

entirely compatible with the exercise of the rights of citizenship, and

the performance of the duties which we all owe to our homes and our

country. Confident that you will do this, and with no doubt or misgiving

as to your success, I bid you Godspeed. I find I have written to the

association rather than to thyself, but as one of the principal

originators and most faithful supporters, it was very natural that I

should identify thee with it.

THE INNER LIFE

THE AGENCY OF EVIL.

From the Supernaturalism of New England, in the Democratic Review for

1843.

IN this life of ours, so full of mystery, so hung about with wonders, so

written over with dark riddles, where even the lights held by prophets

and inspired ones only serve to disclose the solemn portals of a future

state of being, leaving all beyond in shadow, perhaps the darkest and

most difficult problem which presents itself is that of the origin of

evil,--the source whence flow the black and bitter waters of sin and

suffering and discord,--the wrong which all men see in others and feel

in themselves,--the unmistakable facts of human depravity and misery. A

superficial philosophy may attempt to refer all these dark phenomena of

man's existence to his own passions, circumstances, and will; but the

thoughtful observer cannot rest satisfied with secondary causes. The

grossest materialism, at times, reveals something of that latent dread

of an invisible and spiritual influence which is inseparable from our

nature. Like Eliphaz the Temanite, it is conscious of a spirit passing

before its face, the form whereof is not discerned.

It is indeed true that our modern divines and theologians, as if to atone

for the too easy credulity of their order formerly, have unceremoniously

consigned the old beliefs of Satanic agency, demoniacal possession, and

witchcraft, to Milton's receptacle of exploded follies and detected

impostures,

"Over the backside of the world far off,

Into a limbo broad and large, and called

The paradise of fools,"--