of representative men were sometimes directly contradictory.  On January 20, 1827, for instance, Henry Clay, then Secretary of State, speaking in the hall of the House of Representatives at the annual meeting of the Society, said:  “Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored.  It is the inevitable result of their moral, political, and civil degradation.  Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them, to the slaves and to the whites.”  Just a moment later he said:  “Every emigrant to Africa is a missionary carrying with him credentials in the holy cause of civilization, religion, and free institutions.”  How persons contaminated and vicious could be missionaries of civilization and religion was something possible only in the logic of Henry Clay.  In the course of the next month Robert Y. Hayne gave a Southern criticism in two addresses on a memorial presented in the United States Senate by the Colonization Society.[1] The first of these speeches was a clever one characterized by much wit and good-humored raillery; the second was a sober arraignment.  Hayne emphasized the tremendous cost involved and the physical impossibility of the whole undertaking, estimating that at least sixty thousand persons a year would have to be transported to accomplish anything like the desired result.  At the close of his brilliant attack, still making a veiled plea for the continuance of slavery, he nevertheless rose to genuine statesmanship in dealing with the problem of the Negro, saying, “While this process is going on the colored classes are gradually diffusing themselves throughout the country and are making steady advances in intelligence and refinement, and if half the zeal were displayed in bettering their condition that is now wasted in the vain and fruitless effort of sending them abroad, their intellectual and moral improvement would be steady and rapid.”  William Lloyd Garrison was untiring and merciless in flaying the inconsistencies and selfishness of the colonization organization.  In an editorial in the Liberator, July 9, 1831, he charged the Society, first, with persecution in compelling free people to emigrate against their will and in discouraging their education at home; second, with falsehood in saying that the Negroes were natives of Africa when they were no more so than white Americans were natives of Great Britain; third, with cowardice in asserting that the continuance of the Negro population in the country involved dangers; and finally, with infidelity in denying that the Gospel has full power to reach the hatred in the hearts of men.  In Thoughts on African Colonisation (1832) he developed exhaustively ten points as follows:  That the American Colonization Society was pledged not to oppose the system of slavery, that it apologized for slavery and slaveholders, that it recognized slaves as property, that by deporting Negroes it increased the value of slaves, that it was the enemy of immediate abolition, that it was