longer rule the Nation, rebelled against it.  In Liverpool, the centre of vast commercial and manufacturing interests, he showed how those interests are injured by Slavery,—­“that this attempt to cover the fairest portion of the earth with a slave-population that buys nothing, and a degraded white population that buys next to nothing, should array against it the sympathy of every true political economist and every thoughtful and far-seeing manufacturer, as tending to strike at the vital want of commerce,—­not the want of cotton, but the want of customers.”

In his great closing effort at Exeter Hall in London, Mr. Beecher began by disclaiming the honor of having been a pioneer in the anti-slavery movement, which he found in progress at his entry upon public life, when he “fell into the ranks, and fought as well as he knew how, in the ranks or in command.”  He unfolded before his audience the plan and connection of his previous addresses, showing how they were related to each other as parts of a consecutive series.  He had endeavored, he told them, to enlist the judgment, the conscience, the interests of the British people against the attempt to spread Slavery over the continent, and the rebellion it has kindled.  He had shown that Slavery was the only cause of the war, that sympathy with the South was only aiding the building up of a slave-empire, that the North was contending for its own existence and that of popular institutions.

Mr. Beecher then asked his audience to look at the question with him from the American point of view.  He showed how the conflict began as a moral question; the sensitiveness of the South; the tenderness for them on the part of many Northern apologizers, with whom he himself had never stood.  He pointed out how the question gradually emerged in politics; the encroachments of the South, until they reached the Judiciary itself; he repeated to them the admissions of Mr. Stephens as to the preponderating influence the South had all along held in the Government.  An interruption obliged him to explain that adjustment of our State and National governments which Englishmen seem to find so hard to understand.  Nothing shows his peculiar powers to more advantage than just such interruptions.  Then he displays his felicitous facility of illustration, his familiar way of bringing a great question to the test of some parallel fact that everybody before him knows.  An American state-question looks as mysterious to an English audience as an ear of Indian corn wrapt in its sheath to an English wheat-grower.  Mr. Beecher husks it for them as only an American born and bred can do.  He wants a few sharp questions to rouse his quick spirit.  He could almost afford to carry with him his picadores to sting him with sarcasms, his chulos to flap their inflammatory epithets in his face, and his banderilleros to stab him with their fiery insults into a plaza de toros,—­an audience of John Bulls.