The resolution was unanimously adopted.

JAMES C. JACKSON, of Peterboro', N. Y. offered the following resolution, which was unanimously adopted:

Resolved, That the fundamental principles of this government are utterly hostile to the existence of American Slavery; and that the safety and welfare of the country requires its immediate abolition.

MR. JACKSON Supported his resolution in a very eloquent and animated speech, which elicited frequent bursts of applause. Among other things he said,-"It is not so much what has been done to endanger liberty, as the way in which it has been done. Encouraged by our sinful lethargy, the foe has crept upon us, and lulled us with her syren melodies, and killed our sympathy for humanity, by persuading us that we have no concern with aught beyond our own State boundaries. What has the North to do with slavery? It is the most common question in the world; and it is thought to contain within itself an all-sufficient and convincing ar gument against abolition agitation. What have we to do with slavery, Mr. President? I'll tell you what, by examining the grand principles of law. Let us see if they stand firm in our land as they should. One is, that every man be deemed innocent till he is proved guilty; a second is, that no man shall be permitted to make oath in his own behalf. Why is the first of these indispensable? Because the very fact of accusation raises a prejudice in the community against the accused. You know what an excitable thing is the popular will, and how blind a thing is popular fury; and therefore it is necessary, in order to secure fair play for the accused, that law should throw her protecting arms around him. Suppose this rule inverted. Let every individual accused be supposed guilty till he proves himself innocent. Now see what his chance is. I am accused of breaking open a shop. How am I to prové my innocence? I cannot do it but by proving an alibi. I must show that I was somewhere else at the time. I cannot do it, perhaps. I am very likely-so is any man-to be unable. It is always a very difficult thing to prove a negative. I go to jail. The door creaks upon its hinges as it closes after me-the key turns in the lock-my chance to obtain evidence of my innocence is very good, to be sure! I can imagine a thousand cases in which a man might thus be cast into prison, out of personal ill-will or envy, or from motives of political expediency. It was easy work for my accuser. All he had to do was to swear that I was guilty; and there I am shut up from the open face of day and the world of living beings, and bidden to prove my innocence! But in a land like this, more can play at that game than one, if it is permitted. Another man comes along, and accuses my accuser, and has him put under lock and key. A third may serve him the same trick, and so on. Why, Boston might put itself into the State prison, in this way! (Laughter.) What a high road to despotism! No matter who outrages this principle of law, whig or democrat--'tis all one -he has no love of liberty in him. Then for a second, on which

the law of evidence is founded. If you would prove any offence committed against you, you must bring evidence out of yourself. Suppose I come upon you for debt. We are both interested parties. You swear from sunrise to sunset, that you do not owe me a dollar, and I swear the contrary, from sunset to sunrise. You see that we must bring somebody else, or claims to property could never be adjusted by law. But where does a man get his right to call property his own? He cannot do it, unless he owns himself to begin with. He cannot own a hat, unless he owns a head. It is utterly impossible. (Applause.) But Americans have forgotten this, some of them. They have slumbered and slept, when they should have wrought out their day, and the darkness of slavery has settled down upon them. I trust it is well nigh over, sir, but it is not sunrise yet, as I can show.

Suppose, as I go out to-night, a man claps his hand on my shoulder, and claims me as his slave, and goes and makes oath to that effect. Says he, "I've caught the fellow at last; I've been searching for him every where. He ran away from me fifteen years ago. He's a little short fellow, about five feet four inches high-goes about the country delivering anti-slavery lectures, and calls himself Jackson." This is a hard case for me-you will all pity me; but I want help: and how can you help me? You cannot do it. The whole world may condole with me, from morning till night; but where's their power, sir? Gone-departed from them, when they suffered a great principle of law to be tampered with, and shorn of its strength by the Delilah of slavery! Now let me see them try to aid me. They can swear that I am not a slave, and my master can swear that I am a slave. The law, such as you have consented to receive it, will grant these two parties the privilege of swearing over me and about me ;-does it give me the same-being a slave? No. For any thing that I can do, I must be ironed, lest I should escape. All you can do is to ask the court to give me time to prove my innocence of being a slave, before I am carried away to the South. Things are better in Massachusetts, I believe, than elsewhere. Here, I can claim delay, and a legal trial. Well, the man tables his charge, that I ran away from his plantation in 1825. I am able to bring witnesses to prove that I was living in the state of New York in 1824, and thus I break down his evidence. But he has another man on hand, ready to swear that he owned me in 1824. With expense and delay, and vexation and distress of mind, I may be able to bring forward evidence to break down that. But now comes a sagacious man-a knowing one; and he races the country with dozens of witnesses at his back. Says he, "I go for the peculiar institution!" and he swears he owns the whole of us! Here is the peculiar institution in grand geometrical progression! (Laughter.)

Fellow citizens! if we believe that all men are created equal-if we value the principles of law by which our institutions for the maintenance of freedom and equality are upheld-if we would in

dulge the faintest hope of their perpetuity, we must rally the community in their behalf. There is no hope, if the love of them is permitted to become extinct. All our boasted fabric of society will be overthrown. It can last no longer than the people continue to love freedom. Whither were we drifting, in the slumbers of fancied security? Down-down to the old kingdoms and empires, whose memory is blotted out in night and ashes! Down as did Rome, when she dashed the cup of freedom from her lips, and but sunk deeper for the weight of her corrupted soldiery. Greece, too! -land of science and of song! for 2000 years have the hoofs of the coursers of despotism thundered over the plains she gave up to their devastations. Call up all the mighty statesmen of old! They cry, wo, wo to that people, and to their princes and their great ones in the midst of them, who suffer themselves to be shorn and bound, and delivered over to the Philistine grasp of despotism and slavery. (Applause.)

the

The price of liberty is vigilance. We cannot too deeply feel it. Let it not be said that I have drawn upon my imagination to-night. All that I have named, can be done is done, to the people of Massachusetts. Let me give an instance, familiar in the State of New York. When De Witt Clinton was in office, one of the citizens of New York, named James Horton, had a curiosity to travel, to see the world; and being rich in what the world calls the one thing needful, he was able to indulge his curiosity. He had heard of the capital the seat of the national government, where the gifted and wise and eloquent representatives of a free people sit, it is to be supposed, watching over the freedom and the rights of their constituents; he had heard of the noble buildings, - the pictures, models of works of ingenuity and art there deposited, the flag of his country, waving over all:-so down he went to Washington, to gratify his eyes with the sight. Going down the steps of the Capitol, a man seizes hold of him, and claims him as a slave. "Away!" exclaimed Horton: "I am no slave!" "But you are mine by virtue of this advertisement." "Prove it," demanded Horton. "Your color is proof," said the man, unless you have free papers. "Free papers!" cried Horton, indignantly; "thank God, I can show you A 'MAN, with reason, feeling, imagination! and yet you lay your ruffian hands upon me!" Well, but you needn't talk so loud. Just walk along gently with me." "Where?" cries Horton. collect, now, what the North has to do with slavery. This free, rich, northern citizen, accused of being a slave, is, without a shadow of evidence, dragged off to a house built with the aid of northern money, for the good people of the District to confine criminals in! and, there he is required to prove that he is not a slave! Now there are great facilities in a room twelve feet square for proving that! He cannot do it! So he is to be kept there, till the terrors of bankrupt cy for his maintenance shall strike the heart of the general government. They feed him only with breal and water, for economy's sake, but pay-day must come, and then they ask him for his jail-fees.

..

Re

He cannot pay them. He is rich, to be sure, in New York, but it is for no one's interest to have that appear, any more than the fact of his being free. It would spoil a part of their calculation; and there is a way, and a very easy one, of arranging the whole to their own satisfaction. The jailor opens the door of his cell, and leads him out, in view of all Congress, to the auction block! the auctioneer puts him up, and cries out, "Ho, all ye lovers of liberty! rulers of a free people! A MAN for sale! A noble one, too! six feet three, if he's an inch -eye like an eagle!" "Four hundred dollars!" bawls out a man who came there from Alabama, to take care of justice, order, tranquillity and all that, according to the constitu. tion! He sends him off-down into Alabama, to drag out a weary life of toil for another. His wife, whom he grieves most of all that he shall never more see, his child, whom he would have brought up in the ways of virtue and liberty, he is torn from them both. In that sickly and unwonted clime - his heart devoured by indig nation and despair, he is driven the round of his bondage till death comes, to liberate the victim ;- the victim of our general government. All the friends he left behind are ignorant of his fate - he died among strangers, unthought of and unpitied, but not unforgotten! All this shall dwell in the book of God's remembrance, till such time as the polluted earth shall be rent open before him, when he comes to make inquisition for blood! (Strong sensation and applause.) But it did not go quite this length with James Horton. He found an acquaintance from West Chester, at Washington. It was the man he had happened to send to Congress as his repre sentative, a few months before. The West Chester man, by good hap, knew his constituent, shut up in the room twelve feet square, because somebody thought he was a slave! But how was he to be gotten out? Why, sir, the West Chester man was obliged to send all the way home to West Chester, to let them know that their fellow-citizen was in jail. A petition of five hundred names was forth with sent to De Witt Clinton in his behalf-and De Witt Clinton demanded him in the name of the State of New York. But every man so situated, who wants to go to Washington, may not happen personally to be known to the representative he sent there, or be able to get at him, if he were.

Then there was Mary Gilmer, an Irish girl in Philadelphia, who was seized by a slaveholder; and had it not been for Thomas Shipley, (peace to his memory! he was a righteous man!) she must have been hurled into slavery: with a complexion and eyes, too, that bore testimony to her free descent.

Then there was a tremendous excitement raised by a Mr. Dav enport, a northern man, who went and got a southern wife and southern property with her. One of his slaves ran away, and he came northward in search of her; out of his great love and kind. ness he did that, because he felt fearful that she was not competent to take care of herself. He offered three hundred dollars to any one who would only get him so much information as would enable him

to throw his protecting arms around her once more. But these were hard times, and no one moved in the matter. He offered a larger bonus. He made it five hundred dollars, and then the hu man blood-sucker started, and opened his leach mouth. They searched somebody's house for her, from top to bottom, but they did not find her, for a simple reason-they did not look where she was. (A laugh.) After they were out of the way, she was conveyed thence to Canada; and they who saw that girl first tread the British soil say that her joyful emotion can be neither imagined nor described. She felt what she never had felt, never could feel in the United States: she felt SECURE! and she blessed God with tears of thanksgiving.

The gentleman who told me this, described her to me as a tall, straight, fair, good-looking girl. Every place has its own standard of taste, and he used our Peterborough standard. "She is," said he, "as good-looking as the Downer girls." Now the Downer girls are considered a little the handsomest of any girls in that part of the country!

Davenport knew enough about slavery, to be sure that a fugitive would not linger long where there was danger of being re-taken. He knew better than to be beating about here for her. He went straight to Canada to look for her. But suppose she had come here? So fine a girl might have entered into a matrimonial contract with some one. The slaveholder, while peering round here, might chance to enter her house. He might be seized with faintness in the street, and claim the stranger's cup of cold water at her hands. Fancy his astonishment as he recognizes her. "Why, Harriet! is this you! glad to see you again, Harriet! whose fine blooming children are these?" Hardly are the words out of his lips, when the husband enters, and asks his business. Why, sir, I have a claim upon your wife." "Claim! what-how?" cries the husband, in rage and alarm. (He begins to think, then, of human rights!)

66

"What have you to say, about my wife?" "Only that I own her, to all intents and purposes whatsoever; and, Mister! I'll strike a bargain with you. Harriet was worth, when I lost her, one thousand dollars. I've been deprived of her some years - that ought to count for something-the four children are worth, say, five hundred dollars apiece. Well, well, I'll take three thousand dollars, and convey to you all my right and title in your wife and children!" - and old Massachusetts law backs the fellow up!! Oh, we have nothing to do with slavery!

Sir, northern men have slept till slavery has touched them in the tenderest point. They have suffered it to tamper with the pillars on which their social fabric rests; and shortly, unless its progress had been stayed, I say NO MAN had been safe against its claims in the Capital of Massachusetts.

But, I praise God, its march has been arrested. We have heard, to-night, how:-by the counter-march of Anti-Slavery principles. They are" going down" into every department of Church and State.