In choosing teachers to be the guides and exemplars of our children, we demand high moral worth; and we would as soon thrust our youth into the centre of pestilence, as amid the contagion of vicious and profligate men.

In selecting our religious guides, we feel almost justified in being captiously and morbidly critical; we hardly admit that we can be strict to a fault; and the man who fails to carry personal purity and exemplariness into the pastoral…

Our highest state offices have been filled for years, saving very rare exceptions, with men of distinguished probity and a spotless life.

And why, in this department, should we ever grant dispensations and absolutions; or, like the old popes, sell indulgences to sin?

Now, let this doctrine be applied; for I hold it to be no unwarrantable invasion of private character to apply these principles to public men.

If it is public for example, it is public for criticism; and, under such circumstances, the moral and religious guides of the community are as solemnly bound “truly to find, and due presentment make,” of these offences, as the grand jury…

Is this an example you desire to set before the ingenuous and aspiring youth of the land; ay, before your own children?

We have had men in the presidential chair not without faults and blemishes of character; but hitherto we may proudly say, that we never have had one there who drowned his reason in his cups.

Think of this magnificent ship of state freighted with twenty-three millions of souls, and laden to the scuppers with the wealth of the world’s hopes, with a pilot at the helm--drunk!

We prize and honor the home-bred virtues of diligence and thrift; for they bestow upon us all our comforts, the means of educating our children, and leave us a magnificent surplus for godlike charities to be scattered over the world.

Why welcome and court and feed the prodigalities and sensualities of the old world, to corrupt the pristine virtues of the new?

Can they be good citizens, or, at least, are they not grievously deluded, who will give such purses to such a man for being the advocate and agent of their special interests, while there are hundreds of suffering men and women, and more…

Do you want your children to grow up inflamed by such examples of excess and wantonness?

Well, if this be your philosophy, don’t do the work by halves, but import Lucifer at once!

Now, fellow-citizens, you know that all the men who are guilty of these great derelictions from civil and social duty are the men who uphold the Fugitive Slave law.

I only desire to awaken your attention to the great duty of extending the domain of conscience over politics; of holding public men answerable for those vices which it is a great misnomer to call private when they are committed in the face…

The pulpit is false to its trust” if it does not follow and rebuke them, under whatever robes of official dignity they may hold their revels.

That age has passed; and how contemptible does all its greatness now appear!

In that day, the lawgivers of the land shall be no longer “compromisers” between duty and mammon, and the judges shall judge in righteousness.

In that day, the gospel of human brotherhood, of doing as we would be done by, and of loving our neighbors as ourselves, shall no longer be doled out to us by priests of the broad phylactery sort, in homœopathic doses, reduced to the five…

But in that glorious day, the men who sit in the Areopagus of the nation, clothed with the ermine of the law, shall be, as the heathen of old figured the emblem of Justice, blind in the outward eye; and all they know of color shall be to…

Paul shall preach what he preached, when standing “in the midst of Mars Hill,”--a God of equity, of righteousness, of justice, of benevolence; the God who made “of one blood all nations of men,” who, alas! to so many in our day is “the…

Fellow-citizens, if you wish to coöperate in bringing on this glorious era, your first step is to vote for that noble man who ransomed his own slaves,--JOHN G.

Especially does it behoove us to inquire, by what means, by whose instrumentality, the country has been instigated to this treason against the rights of men, and when we may expect their machinations will be brought to an end.

He saw fit to curl his lip and to intonate his voice in scorn of the principle of the ordinance of 1787, and to dishonor the memory of Nathan Dane, whom, a few years before, on the same spot, he had eulogized.