the value of our privileges, and made us more sensible than we were before of the obligation which lies upon us to promote every good work.  I have been requested to say a few words on the degradation of American slavery; but I feel, in the presence of the gentleman who last addressed you, and of those who are still to address you, that it would be almost presumption in me to enter on such a subject.  It is impossible to speak or to think of the subject of slavery without feeling that there is a double degradation in the matter; for, in the first place, the slave is a man made in the image of God—­God’s image cut in ebony, as old Thomas Fuller quaintly but beautifully said; and what right have we to reduce him to the image of a brute, and make property of him?  We esteem drunkenness as a sin.  Why is it a sin?  Because it reduces that which was made in the image of God to the image of a brute.  We say to the drunkard, ’You are guilty of a sacrilege, because you reduce that which God made in his own image “into the image of an irrational creature."’ Slavery does the very same.  But there is not only a degradation committed as regards the slave—­there is a degradation also committed against himself by him who makes him a slave, and who retains him in the position of a slave; for is it not one of the most commonplace of truths that we cannot do a wrong to a neighbor without doing a greater wrong to ourselves?—­that we cannot injure him without also injuring ourselves yet more?  I observe there is a certain class of writers in America who are fond of representing the feeling of this country towards America as one of jealousy, if not of hatred..  I think, my lord, that no American ever travelled in this country without being conscious at once that this is a total mistake—­that this is a total misapprehension.  I venture to say that there is no nation on the face of the earth in which we feel half so much interest, or towards which we feel the tenth part of the affection, which we do towards our brethren in the United States of America.  And what is more than that—­there is no nation towards which we feel one half so much admiration, and for which we feel half so much respect, as we do for the people of the United States of America. [Cheers.] Why, sir, how can it be otherwise?  How is it possible that it should be the reverse?  Are they not our bone and our flesh? and their character, whatever it is, is it any thing more than our own, a little exaggerated, perhaps?  Their virtues and their vices, their faults and their excellences, are just the virtues and the vices, the faults and the excellences, of that old respectable freeholder, John Bull, from whom they are descended.  We are not much surprised that a nation which are slaves themselves should make other men slaves.  This cannot very much surprise us:  but we are both surprised and we are deeply grieved, that a nation which has conceived so well the idea of freedom—­a nation which has preached the doctrines of freedom