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Show 108 THIRD DAY-AFTERNOON SF.SSJON, nt the head of which, by force of the above doctrine, as Queet~, is a young boarding-school, piano-playing girl, eighteen years of age, with powe~ to declare war and de(urre the world in blood, make peace, veto the muted Legislation of Lords a~1d Commons in Parliament a:ssembled, to direct fleets and lead armies. The doctrine of this world on the 3d of July, 1776, was, that some persons are created superior to others, inheriting the right to make, judge of, and execute laws, which the rest are created to obey. But before the sun went down on the 4th of July, 1776, the mighty moral disco\·ery was proclaimed from this v~ry city,_ th~t ~~all me11: are created equal, and emlowr.d by their Creator with certam wallenable nghts, among whic.h are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these riuhts, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power fr~m the consent of the governed.'' Such men as a Mihan, a Sydney, and a Russell, in thei1· musings upon the rights of llllmanity, had caught glimpses of this truth-shadowy and undefined like the vision which passed before the face of Eliphaz the Temanite,- a spirit passed before them, "but the form thereof was not discerned." They hatl prophet revelations of the dawning of a better day. Looking down the vast future, they beheld on those plains in the land of the setting sun, beyond the wilderness of waters, where Hesperus trembles on the borders of the circling heavens, man in full possession of the great charter of his rights. This mighty discovery is but a DEFINITION OF l'!IAN, as considered in relation to every other man. Dut no great politician or philosopher in the European world dared make this definition known, because it would have been high treason against the fundamental laws of European society. This defini~ion would have brought to the block the best man in Europe, as the reward of his temerity. The three great truths, or political discoveries, are-1st. Equality at birth. 2d. The universal endowment of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happines~. 3d. That all governments should be made to secure these high interests. Therefore, all governments must be made by those whose interests they are intended to secure. Well might the politicians, philosophers, and philanthropists, believe the philosopher's stone had at last been discovered; and that the signers of the Declaration of Independence had been permitted to ascend, like Moses, into the Mount of God, to discover, from a loftier altitude, the relations of man to man. Good men cried out in ecstacy, from every corner of the earth where the human mind was not so degraded as to haveforgollen the loftiness of its lineage. The new and joyful era hnd arrived, in which the governed, to protect his liberty, his life, and pursuit of happiness, made and created the governor. Tms IS A REPUBLICAN FORM Oio' GOVERNMENT. The purchase money of this truth was paid in blood, which flowed from the free hearts of our fathers. Oh, costly definition of human liberty! The assertion of this great definition of man, in his social state, is, by force of its terms, the abolition of all slavery, wherever the definition is honored or respected. But with us this definition of Human Rights is, practically, but an empty abstraction, instead of being the very life of our republicanism! To tolerate slavery a single year in one of these states, after this Declaration oflndependence, was a base hypocrisy, a violation of our engagements to mankind, and to God. ".!l.nd fo.,. the support of this Declaration," said they, "with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine J>rovidence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, onr fortunes, and our sacred honor." SPEECH OF ALVAN STF.WART. 109 . T~1is awful and solemn promise, made in behalf of liberty, to all persons Ill th1s land, in the presence of mankind and the great Jehovah, in that awful moment of a nation's agony and peril, stands unredeemed, uncancelled, and WlS~ll~tlfled; sixty-one years and three hundred and fifleen days have gone to JOIIl the years and days beyond the flood; every year, every month, yea, every day ami hour, have gone to the .Judge of all the earth, clamoring, long and loud, for the execution of this vow. 'J'he issue of 177G was not alone between the governments of the old world, and their r.hildren, the colonies of the new. This issue, tendered by .the framers of the Declaration of 1776, was done not only for the Un1ted States; but as the representatives of human nature oppressed. their d~cument was the property of both Americas, and of the New 'World. L1~erty fo~ all is ~emandetl; labor in all is honorable; tyranny is every where od1ous; kHlnappmg and stealing men and their labor is the essence of sin and meanness. Look at the products of their issue. Behold thirteen of the United States free from slavery! Six empires on this continent have pronounced that the color of a man's skin and his liberty have no relation to each other, and that all men are created equal and free, to wit,-l\'lexico, New Granada, Central America, Venezuela, Chili, and Peru. These hlood-bought countries have started the great journey of liberty and independence, with slavery abolished throughout their great domaim;. Iu fact, the continent is an abolition continent; and Catholic countries, in the march of Liberty, have gone beyond this land of boasting Protestantism. Under the glorious issue, framed by the Fathers oflndependence,~ tl1at all men are created equal, the bomlmen of ~fassachusetts, of Connecticut, of New York, of Pennsylvania, and of New Jersey, have thrown down their broken yokes, as the trophies of the great definition, and the shout of Freedom which burst forth and rolled in thunders through th<' unmeasured prairies of the West, swept over the Rocky Mountains, and Mexico caught the joyful sound, and declared all men for e\•er free in the land of Montezuma. The white, the black, the red, joined in the chorus: ALL ~tEN ARE CREATED EQUAL. Yes, five empires more heard the thrilling sounds, and from the lonely mine-digger of the ca\'ern-worlds beneath the bed of the Pacific, to the solitary shepherd on the snow-clad Cordilleras, and from the Mexicas Gulf to the ever-blazing fires of the Andes. as the eternal truth went up the mountains and rolled over the pampas solitudes of the South, and flowed down the mighty rivers, all heard the words of resurrection and of life, and from the trance of ages stood up in the primeval sovereignty of fttEN ! St. Domingo heard that man was born free and -created equal, and, at the end of three centuries of slavery, stood erect,-a nation of freemen, manufactured out of goods and chattels. England, in the days of George the Third, paid four hundred millions of dollar~ to liestroy our definition of man, and in the reign of 'Villiam the Fourth the same nation, fifty-seven years after, paid one hundred millions of dollars to purchase it for eight hundred thousand slaves in thAir \Vest Indies. Those new lexicographers who overturned the governments of the new world by the power of a definition, and eut the bands of trans-atlantic connection, and·turned the world upside down, and unlocked sufl'ering humanity and delivered it from its prisonhouse, if they could be summoneli from the long dreamless sleep of their graves, would be overcome with astonishment to find thirteen states of this republic still clinging to slavery with a death-grasp; and that their declaration, which had driven slavery from all other parts of the continent, was unable to deliver two and a half millions of the most wretched slaves wJtich the sun evfll' :shone npo11. T'hese fath('rS, ~ummonetl from their gnwe~, |