Men of Massachusetts! moral and religious men! lovers of freedom and of your country, were you prepared for this?

Let me read to you the disparaging and contemptuous remark of the address on that great palladium of human liberty, the trial by jury.

The kidnapper, Alberti, now lies in a Pennsylvania prison for carrying away a mother and her child; but the mother and the child are now groaning under the lash of a southern taskmaster.

These are but specimens of what the Fugitive Slave law has already done, before the public mind has become familiarized with its brutalities, and while there is yet some sensibility to the claims of justice and mercy left among us.

I answer, that this difference which they so be-little and disparage will often be all the difference between freedom and bondage, between life and death, between honor and infamy, between happiness and perdition.

My instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, may all mislead; but from the first time, now years ago, when I heard this subject broached, my instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, have all been in its favor.

Why, fellow-citizens, the ballot is worse than useless, if it be not FREE!

Better be debarred from the privilege of voting at all, than to be mocked with the form, while cheated of the substance.

A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.

The liberty of voting includes all other liberties.

The man of independent circumstances has this liberty; and no man’s circumstances, not even the poorest and the humblest, should be so dependent as to take it away.

Wherever the wicked passions of the human heart can go, there slavery can go.

Avarice, sloth, pride, and the love of domination, are its cause.

How high up can a slaveholder go and not lose his free agency?

At what elevation will the whip fall from the hand of the master, and the fetter from the limbs of the slave?

Should it be said that slavery will not go into the new territories, because it is unprofitable; I ask, Where is it profitable?

Do not Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and other states, furnish witnesses by thousands and tens of thousands that slavery impoverishes?

Generally, ignorance is a necessary concomitant of slavery.

Can there be genius, the inventive talent, or profitable labor, where ignorance is so dense?

Yet this is done wherever slavery exists, and is part and parcel of its working.

It is not poetry, but literal truth, that the breath of the slave blasts vegetation, his tears poison the earth, and his groans strike it with sterility.

There is a combination of poverty and pride, which slavery produces, on the doctrine of natural appetence, and which, therefore, it exactly fits.

All moral and religious principles are lowered till they conform to the daily practice.

Custom blinds conscience, until, without any attempt to emancipate or ameliorate their victims, men can preach and pray and hold slaves, as Hamlet’s grave digger jests and sings while he turns up skulls.

But admit slavery there, and the power of the government will be invoked to exterminate these Indians, as it was before to exterminate the Cherokees and Seminoles,--not to drive them beyond the Mississippi, but beyond the Styx.