and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

that all men are created equal,

My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY.

The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft-interred with their bones.

He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise.

They were great men too — great enough to give fame to a great age.

Oppression makes a wise man mad.

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy.

There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.

I repeat, I am glad this is so.

That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude.

I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered.

A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech.

Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: