Having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am unwilling to close without referring more particularly to Mr. Clay’s views and conduct in regard to it.  He ever was on principle and in feeling opposed to slavery.  The very earliest, and one of the latest, public efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were both made in favor of gradual emancipation.  He did not perceive that on a question of human right the negroes were to be excepted from the human race.  And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves.  Cast into life when slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated without producing a greater evil even to the cause of human liberty itself.  His feeling and his judgment, therefore, ever led him to oppose both extremes of opinion on the subject.  Those who would shiver into fragments the Union of these States, tear to tatters its now venerated Constitution, and even burn the last copy of the Bible, rather than slavery should continue a single hour, together with all their more halting sympathizers, have received, and are receiving, their just execration; and the name and opinions and influence of Mr. Clay are fully and, as I trust, effectually and enduringly arrayed against them.  But I would also, if I could, array his name, opinions, and influence against the opposite extreme—­against a few but an increasing number of men who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white man’s charter of freedom, the declaration that “all men are created free and equal.”  So far as I have learned, the first American of any note to do or attempt this was the late John C. Calhoun; and if I mistake not, it soon after found its way into some of the messages of the Governor of South Carolina.  We, however, look for and are not much shocked by political eccentricities and heresies in South Carolina.  But only last year I saw with astonishment what purported to be a letter of a very distinguished and influential clergyman of Virginia, copied, with apparent approbation, into a St. Louis newspaper, containing the following to me very unsatisfactory language: 

“I am fully aware that there is a text in some Bibles that is not in mine.  Professional abolitionists have made more use of it than of any passage in the Bible.  It came, however, as I trace it, from Saint Voltaire, and was baptized by Thomas Jefferson, and since almost universally regarded as canonical authority`All men are born free and equal.’

“This is a genuine coin in the political currency of our generation.  I am sorry to say that I have never seen two men of whom it is true.  But I must admit I never saw the Siamese Twins, and therefore will not dogmatically say that no man ever saw a proof of this sage aphorism.”

This sounds strangely in republican America.  The like was not heard in the fresher days of the republic.  Let us contrast with it the language of that truly national man whose life and death we now commemorate and lament:  I quote from a speech of Mr. Clay delivered before the American Colonization Society in 1827: