desired, and _confounded_ for the garden they had chosen? Did John
the Baptist _abuse_ the Jews when he called them "_a generation of
vipers_" and warned them "to bring forth fruits meet for repentance?"
Did Peter abuse the Jews when he told them they were the murderers of
the Lord of Glory? Did Paul abuse the Roman Governor when he reasoned
before him of righteousness, temperance, and judgment, so as to send
conviction home to his guilty heart, and cause him to tremble in view
of the crimes he was living in? Surely not. No man will _now_ accuse
the prophets and apostles of _abuse_, but what have Abolitionists done
more than they? No doubt the Jews thought the prophets and apostles in
their day, just as harsh and uncharitable as slaveholders now, think
Abolitionists; if they did not, why did they beat, and stone, and kill
them?

Great fault has been found with the prints which have been employed to
expose slavery at the North, but my friends, how could this be done
so effectually in any other way? Until the pictures of the slave's
sufferings were drawn and held up to public gaze, no Northerner had
any idea of the cruelty of the system, it never entered their minds
that such abominations could exist in Christian, Republican America;
they never suspected that many of the _gentlemen_ and _ladies_ who
came from the South to spend the summer months in travelling among
them, were petty tyrants at home. And those who had lived at the
South, and came to reside at the North, were too _ashamed of slavery_
even to speak of it; the language of their hearts was, "tell it _not_
in Gath, publish it _not_ in the streets of Askelon;" they saw no use
in uncovering the loathsome body to popular sight, and in hopeless
despair, wept in secret places over the sins of oppression. To such
hidden mourners the formation of Anti-Slavery Societies was as life
from the dead, the first beams of hope which gleamed through the dark