moderation, their constant and anxious endeavor to draw a broad line between their camp and ours, have been thrown away.  Just so far as they have been effective laborers, they have found, as we have, their hands against every man, and every man’s hand against them.  The most experienced of them are ready to acknowledge that our plan has been wise, our course efficient, and that our unpopularity is no fault of ours, but flows necessarily and unavoidably from our position.  “I should suspect,” says old Fuller, “that his preaching had no salt in it, if no galled horse did wince.”  Our friends find, after all, that men do not so much hate us as the truth we utter and the light we bring.  They find that the community are not the honest seekers after truth which they fancied, but selfish politicians and sectarian bigots, who shiver, like Alexander’s butler, whenever the sun shines on them.  Experience has driven these new laborers back to our method.  We have no quarrel with them—­would not steal one wreath of their laurels.  All we claim is, that, if they are to be complimented as prudent, moderate, Christian, sagacious, statesmanlike reformers, we deserve the same praise; for they have done nothing that we, in our measure, did not attempt before.

I claim this, that the cause, in its recent aspect, has put on nothing but timidity.  It has taken to itself no new weapons of recent years; it has become more compromising,—­that is all!  It has become neither more persuasive, more earnest, more Christian, more charitable, nor more effective than for the twenty years pre-ceding.  Mr. Hale, the head of the Free Soil movement, after a career in the Senate that would do honor to any man,—­after a six years’ course which entitles him to the respect and confidence of the antislavery public, can put his name, within the last month, to an appeal from the city of Washington, signed by a Houston and a Cass, for a monument to be raised to Henry Clay!  If that be the test of charity and courtesy, we cannot give it to the world.  Some of the leaders of the Free Soil party of Massachusetts, after exhausting the whole capacity of our language to paint the treachery of Daniel Webster to the cause of liberty, and the evil they thought he was able and seeking to do,—­after that, could feel it in their hearts to parade themselves in the funeral procession got up to do him honor!  In this we allow we cannot follow them.  The deference which every gentleman owes to the proprieties of social life, that self-respect and regard to consistency which is every man’s duty,—­these, if no deeper feelings, will ever prevent us from giving such proofs of this newly invented Christian courtesy.  We do not play politics, antislavery is no half-jest with us; it is a terrible earnest, with life or death, worse than life or death, on the issue.  It is no lawsuit, where it matters not to the good feeling of opposing counsel which way the verdict goes, and where advocates can shake hands after the decision