Sir, when a nation sets itself to do evil, and all its leading forces, wealth, party, and piety, join in the career, it is impossible but that those who offer a constant opposition should be hated and maligned, no matter how wise, cautious, and well planned their course may be.  We are peculiar sufferers in this way.  The community has come to hate its reproving Nathan so bitterly, that even those whom the relenting part of it are beginning to regard as standard-bearers of the antislavery host think it unwise to avow any connection or sympathy with him.  I refer to some of the leaders of the political movement against slavery.  They feel it to be their mission to marshal and use as effectively as possible the present convictions of the people.  They cannot afford to encumber themselves with the odium which twenty years of angry agitation have engendered in great sects sore from unsparing rebuke, parties galled by constant defeat, and leading men provoked by unexpected exposure.  They are willing to confess, privately, that our movement produced theirs, and that its continued existence is the very breath of their life.  But, at the same time, they would fain walk on the road without being soiled by too close contact with the rough pioneers who threw it up.  They are wise and honorable, and their silence is very expressive.

When I speak of their eminent position and acknowledged ability, another thought strikes me.  Who converted these men and their distinguished associates?  It is said we have shown neither sagacity in plans, nor candor in discussion, nor ability.  Who, then, or what converted Burlingame and Wilson, Sumner and Adams, Palfrey and Mann, Chase and Hale, and Phillips and Giddings?  Who taught the Christian Register, the Daily Advertiser, and that class of prints, that there were such things as a slave and a slave-holder in the land, and so gave them some more intelligent basis than their mere instincts to hate William Lloyd Garrison?  What magic wand was it whose touch made the todying servility of the land start up the real demon that it was, and at the same time gathered into the slave’s service the professional ability, ripe culture, and personal integrity which grace the Free Soil ranks?  We never argue!  These men, then, were converted by simple denunciation!  They were all converted by the “hot,” “reckless,” “ranting,” “bigoted,” “fanatic” Garrison, who never troubled himself about facts, nor stopped to argue with an opponent, but straightway knocked him down!  My old and valued friend, Mr. Sumner, often boasts that he was a reader of the Liberator before I was.  Do not criticise too much the agency by which such men were converted.  That blade has a double edge.  Our reckless course, our empty rant, our fanaticism, has made Abolitionists of some of the best and ablest men in the land.  We are inclined to go on, and see if, even with such poor tools, we cannot make some more.  Antislavery zeal and the roused conscience of the “godless