Men, dead to the operation of moral causes, have taken away from the poor slave his habit of loyalty and obedience to his master, which lightened his servitude by a double operation; beguiling his own cares and disarming his master’s suspicions and severity; and now, like true empirics in politics, you are called upon to trust to the mere physical strength of the fetter which holds him in bondage.  You have deprived him of all moral restraint; you have tempted him to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, just enough to perfect him in wickedness; you have opened his eyes to his nakedness; you have armed his nature against the hand that has fed, that has clothed him, that has cherished him in sickness; that hand which before he became a pupil of your school, he had been accustomed to press with respectful affection.  You have done all this—­and then show him the gibbet and the wheel, as incentives to a sullen, repugnant obedience.  God forbid, sir, that the Southern States should ever see an enemy on their shores, with these infernal principles of French fraternity in the van.  While talking of taking Canada, some of us are shuddering for our own safety at home.  I speak from facts, when I say, that the night-bell never tolls for fire in Richmond, that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her bosom.  I have been a witness of some of the alarms in the capital of Virginia. * * *

Against whom are these charges brought?  Against men, who in the war of the Revolution were in the councils of the nation, or fighting the battles of your country.  And by whom are they made?  By runaways chiefly from the British dominions, since the breaking out of the French troubles.  It is insufferable.  It cannot be borne.  It must and ought, with severity, to be put down in this House; and out of it to meet the lie direct.  We have no fellow-feeling for the suffering and oppressed Spaniards!  Yet even them we do not reprobate.  Strange! that we should have no objection to any other people or government, civilized or savage, in the whole world!  The great autocrat of all the Russias receives the homage of our high consideration.  The Dey of Algiers and his divan of pirates are very civil, good sort of people, with whom we find no difficulty in maintaining the relations of peace and amity.  “Turks, Jews, and infidels”; Melimelli or the Little Turtle; barbarians and savages of every clime and color, are welcome to our arms.  With chiefs of banditti, negro or mulatto, we can treat and trade.  Name, however, but England, and all our antipathies are up in arms against her.  Against whom?  Against those whose blood runs in our veins; in common with whom, we claim Shakespeare, and Newton, and Chatham, for our countrymen; whose form of government is the freest on earth, our own only excepted; from whom every valuable principle of our own institutions has been borrowed:  representation, jury trial, voting the supplies, writ of habeas corpus, our whole