The influence of the Colonization Society on the welfare of the colored race was the first question our movement encountered.  To the close logic, eloquent appeals, and fully sustained charges of Mr. Garrison’s letters on that subject no answer was ever made.  Judge Jay followed with a work full and able, establishing every charge by the most patient investigation of facts.  It is not too much to say of these two volumes, that they left the Colonization Society hopeless at the North.  It dares never show its face before the people, and only lingers in some few nooks of sectarian pride, so secluded from the influence of present ideas as to be almost fossil in their character.

The practical working of the slave system, the slave laws, the treatment of slaves, their food, the duration of their lives, their ignorance and moral condition, and the influence of Southern public opinion on their fate, have been spread out in a detail and with a fulness of evidence which no subject has ever received before in this country.  Witness the words of Phelps, Bourne, Rankin, Grimke, the Anti-slavery Record, and, above all, that encyclopaedia of facts and storehouse of arguments, the Thousand Witnesses of Mr. Theodore D. Weld.  He also prepared that full and valuable tract for the World’s Convention called Slavery and the Internal Slave-Trade in the United States, published in London in 1841.  Unique in antislavery literature is Mrs. Child’s Appeal, one of the ablest of our weapons, and one of the finest efforts of her rare genius.

The Princeton Review, I believe, first challenged the Abolitionists to an investigation of the teachings of the Bible on slavery.  That field had been somewhat broken by our English predecessors.  But in England the pro-slavery party had been soon shamed out of the attempt to drag the Bible into their service, and hence the discussion there had been short and some-what superficial.  The pro-slavery side of the question has been eagerly sustained by theological reviews and doctors of divinity without number, from the half-way and timid faltering of Wayland up to the unblushing and melancholy recklessness of Stuart.  The argument on the other side has come wholly from the Abolitionists; for neither Dr. Hague nor Dr. Barnes can be said to have added any thing to the wide research, critical acumen, and comprehensive views of Theodore D. Weld, Beriah Green, J. G. Fee, and the old work of Duncan.

On the constitutional questions which have at various times arisen,—­the citizenship of the colored man, the soundness of the “Prigg” decision, the constitutionality of the old Fugitive Slave Law, the true construction of the slave-surrender clause,—­nothing has been added, either in the way of fact or argument, to the works of Jay, Weld, Alvan Stewart, E. G. Loring, S. E. Sewall, Richard Hildreth, W. I. Bowditch, the masterly essays of the Emancipator at New York and the Liberator at Boston, and the various