Sharpe, you are absurdly scrupulous.”  “You may innocently aid Government in doing wrong,” adds another.  While Liberty Party yelps at his heels, “My dear Sir, you are quite losing your influence!” And indeed it is melancholy to reflect how, from that moment the mighty underclerk of the War Office(!) dwindled into the mere Granville Sharpe of history! the man of whom Mansfield and Hargrave were content to learn law, and Wilberforce, philanthropy.

One friend proposes to vote for men who shall be pledged not to take office unless the oath to the Constitution is dispensed with, and who shall then go on to perform in their offices only such duties as we, their constituents, approve.  He cites, in support of his view, the election of O’Connell to the House of Commons, in 1828, I believe, just one year before the “Oath of Supremacy,” which was the objectionable one to the Catholics, was dispensed with.  Now, if we stood in the same circumstances as the Catholics did in 1828, the example would be in point.  When the public mind is thoroughly revolutionized, and ready for the change, when the billow has reached its height and begins to crest into foam, then such a measure may bring matters to a crisis.  But let us first go through, in patience, as O’Connell did, our twenty years of agitation.  Waiving all other objections, this plan seems to me mere playing at politics, and an entire waste of effort.

It loses our high position as moral reformers; it subjects us to all that malignant opposition and suspicion of motives which attend the array of parties; and while thus closing up our access to the national conscience, it wastes in fruitless caucussing and party tactics, the time and the effort which should have been directed to efficient agitation.

The history of our Union is lesson enough, for every candid mind, of the fatal effects of every, the least, compromise with evil.  The experience of the fifty years passed under it, shows us the slaves trebling in numbers;—­slaveholders monopolizing the offices and dictating the policy of the Government;—­prostituting the strength and influence of the Nation to the support of slavery here and elsewhere;—­trampling on the rights of the free States, and making the courts of the country their tools.  To continue this disastrous alliance longer is madness.  The trial of fifty years only proves that it is impossible for free and slave States to unite on any terms, without all becoming partners in the guilt and responsible for the sin of slavery.  Why prolong the experiment?  Let every honest man join in the outcry of the American Anti-Slavery Society,

NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS.

WENDELL PHILLIPS.

Boston, Jan. 15, 1845.

THE NO-VOTING THEORY.

“God never made a CITIZEN, and no one will escape as a man, from the sins which he commits as a citizen.”