be heard!” That speaker has lived twenty-two years, and the complaint of twenty-three millions of people is, “Shall we never hear of any thing but slavery?” * * * “Well, it is all HIS fault” [pointing to Mr. Garrison]. * * * It seems to me that such men may point to the present aspect of the nation, to their originally avowed purpose, to the pledges and efforts of all your great men against them, and then let you determine to which side the credit of sagacity and statesmanship belongs.  Napoleon busied himself at St. Helena in showing how Wellington ought to have conquered at Waterloo.  The world has never got time to listen to the explanation.  Sufficient for it that the allies entered Paris.

It may sound strange to some, this claim for Mr. Garrison of a profound statesmanship.  “Men have heard him styled a mere fanatic so long that they are incompetent to judge him fairly.”  “The phrases men are accustomed,” says Goethe, “to repeat incessantly, end by becoming convictions, and ossify the organs of intelligence.”  I cannot accept you, therefore, as my jury.  I appeal from Festus to Csar, from the prejudice of our streets to the common-sense of the world, and to your children.

Every thoughtful and unprejudiced mind must see that such an evil as slavery will yield only to the most radical treatment.  If you consider the work we have to do, you will not think us needlessly aggressive, or that we dig down unnecessarily deep in laying the foundations of our enterprise.  A money power of two thousand millions of dollars, as the prices of slaves now range, held by a small body of able and desperate men; that body raised into a political aristocracy by special constitutional provisions; cotton, the product of slave labor, forming the basis of our whole foreign commerce, and the commercial class thus subsidized; the press bought up, the pulpit reduced to vassalage, the heart of the common people chilled by a bitter prejudice against the black race; our leading men bribed, by ambition, either to silence or open hostility;—­in such a land, on what shall an Abolitionist rely?  On a few cold prayers, mere lip-service, and never from the heart?  On a church resolution, hidden often in its records, and meant only as a decent cover for servility in daily practice?  On political parties, with their superficial influence at best, and seeking ordinarily only to use existing prejudices to the best advantage?  Slavery has deeper root here than any aristocratic institution has in Europe; and politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.  Yet we have seen European aristocracy survive storms which seemed to reach down to the primal strata of European life.  Shall we, then, trust to mere politics, where even revolution has failed?  How shall the stream rise above its fountain?  Where shall our church organizations or parties get strength to attack their great parent and moulder, the slave power?  Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?  The old jest of one who tried to lift himself in his own basket, is but a tame picture of the man who imagines that, by working solely through existing sects and parties, he can destroy slavery.  Mechanics say nothing, but an earthquake strong enough to move all Egypt can bring down the pyramids.