the living God, had received his death-blow before he left our shores.  But what is George Thompson doing there?  Is he not now laboring there, as effectually to abolish American slavery as though he trod our own soil, and lectured to New York or Boston assemblies?  What is he doing there, but constructing a stupendous dam, which will turn the overwhelming tide of public opinion over the wheels of that machinery which Abolitionists are working here.  He is now lecturing to Britons on American Slavery, to the subjects of a King, on the abject condition of the slaves of a Republic.  He is telling them of that mighty Confederacy of petty tyrants which extends over thirteen States of our Union.  He is telling them of the munificent rewards offered by slaveholders, for the heads of the most distinguished advocates for freedom in this country.  He is moving the British Churches to send out to the churches of America the most solemn appeals, reproving, rebuking, and exhorting, them with all long suffering and patience to abandon the sin of slavery immediately.  Where then I ask, will the name of George Thompson stand on the page of History?  Among the honorable, or the base?

What can I say more, my friends, to induce you to set your hands, and heads, and hearts, to the great work of justice and mercy.  Perhaps you have feared the consequences of immediate emancipation, and been frightened by all those dreadful prophecies of rebellion, bloodshed and murder, which have been uttered.  “Let no man deceive you;” they are the predictions of that same “lying spirit” which spoke through the four hundred prophets of old, to Ahab king of Israel, urging him on to destruction. Slavery may produce these horrible scenes if it is continued five years longer, but Emancipation never will.

I can prove the safety of immediate Emancipation by history.  In St. Domingo in 1793 six hundred thousand slaves were set free in a white population of forty-two thousand.  That Island “marched as by enchantment towards its ancient splendor”, cultivation prospered, every day produced perceptible proofs of its progress, and the negroes all continued quietly to work on the different plantations, until in 1802, France determined to reduce these liberated slaves again to bondage.  It was at this time that all those dreadful scenes of cruelty occurred, which we so often unjustly hear spoken of, as the effects of Abolition.  They were occasioned not by Emancipation, but by the base attempt to fasten the chains of slavery on the limbs of liberated slaves.