THE NATURE, CHARACTER, AND HISTORY OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN --Had I consulted my own health, or the advice of my physician, I should have been elsewhere, and otherwise employed this evening. I am not well, and have not been so for several weeks. I have usually come to this platform to lecture on slavery--that darkest and hugest of all wrongs—the vilest (in the language of John Wesley) that ever saw the sun. But it has pleased the Rochester Ladies' Anti-slavery Society to have presented here, during the winter, almost every phase of that terrible wrong; and I have, therefore, selected my topic in view of that fact. It will probably amount to the same thing in the end.
Some one has happily said, that it matters very little which path the traveller may take; he has but to go forward to go round the world. In like manner it may be said, that it matters little which path of inquiry a man may pursue, or which great moral or spiritual fact he may investigate, he has but to honestly persevere, to find himself at last at the portals of the whole universe of truth, and speedily walking amidst its golden glories.
The subject of my lecture this evening is the Nature, Character, and History of the Anti-slavery Movement." I own that were I here on any ordinary occasion to deliver a lecture on the question of slavery, I should select topics of a more popular and stirring character than those I propose to touch this evening. When I speak of the anti-slavery movement, I mean to refer to that combination of moral, religious, and political forces, which has long been, and is now operating and co-operating for the abolition of slavery in this country and throughout the world. I wish to speak of that movement to night more as the calm observer than “as the ardent and personally interested advocate. For while I am willing to have it known that every fibre of my soul is enlisted in the cause of emancipation, I would not have it thought that I am less capable than others of calmly and rationally contemplating the movement designed to accomplish that important and much desired end. In making this statement, I am quite aware of the common impression concerning the mental abilities of my race. It has been said that the variety of the human family to which I belong excels less in the intellectual than in the emotional characteristics of men; and the great leader of the anti-slavery movement in our country allowed himself to say, in the columns of his paper, not long ago, that “the anti-slavery movement, both religiously and politically, has transcended the ability of the sufferers from American slavery and prejudice as a class, to keep pace with it, or to perceive what are its demands, or to understand the philosophy of its operations.” Notwithstanding such discouraging considerations, I presume to speak to you to-night on the subject selected. In doing so I have one consolation, and that is, as I apprehend it, the anti-slavery movement is, after all, no cold abstraction, requiring a sharp and flinty intellect to analyze it. While it is a subject of surpassing dignity, and one upon which the wisest and best minds may be employed, it is, nevertheless, a subject upon which the humblest may venture to think and speak without justly being exposed to the reproach of treading upon ground which should be trodden only by men of the "superior race."