believing it to be a human being; this perhaps is owing to our want of vision to discover the process by which a man is converted into a THING.  For this act of ours, which is not prohibited by our laws, but prompted by every feeling, Christian and humane, the slaveholding power enters our territory, tramples under foot the sovereignty of our State, violates the sanctity of private residence, seizes our citizens, and disregarding the authority of our laws, transports them into its own jurisdiction, casts them into prison, confines them in fetters, and loads them with chains, for pretended offences against their own laws, found by willing grand juries upon the oath (to use the language of the late Governor of Ohio) of a perjured villain.  Is this fancy, or is it fact, sober reality, solemn fact?  Need I say all this, and much more, as now matter of history in the case of the Rev. John B. Mahan, of Brown county, Ohio?  Yes, it is so; but this is but the beginning—­a case of equal outrage has lately occurred, if newspapers are to be relied on, in the seizure of a citizen of Ohio, without even the forms of law, and who was carried into Virginia and shamefully punished by tar and feathers, and other disgraceful means, and rode upon a rail, according to the order of Judge Lynch, and this, only because in Ohio he was an abolitionist.  Would I could stop here—­but I cannot.  This slave interest or power seizes upon persons of color in our States, carries them into States where men are property, and makes merchandize of them, sometimes under sanction of law, but more properly by its abuse, and sometimes by mere personal force, thus disturbing our quiet and harassing our citizens.  A case of this kind has lately occurred, where a colored boy was seduced from Ohio into Indiana, taken from thence into Alabama and sold as a slave; and to the honor of the slave States, and gentlemen who administer the laws there, be it said, that many who have thus been taken and sold by the connivance, if not downright corruption, of citizens in the free States, have been liberated and adjudged free in the States where they have been sold, as was the case of the boy mentioned, who was sold in Alabama.

Slave power is seeking to establish itself in every State, in defiance of the constitution and laws of the States within which it is prohibited.  In order to secure its power beyond the reach of the States, it claims its parentage from the Constitution of the United States.  It demands of us total silence as to its proceedings, denies to our citizens the liberty of speech and the press, and punishes them by mobs and violence for the exercise of these rights.  It has sent its agents into the free States for the purpose of influencing their Legislatures to pass laws for the security of its power within such State, and for the enacting new offences and new punishments for their own citizens, so as to give additional security to its interest.  It demands to be heard in its