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Show 112 'fiJIIlD DAV-A J:"l'~HNOON SESSlON. against him. The foundation stones shall tell him they are softer than his heart. 1 · G d · 1 To this spot the pilgrims of humanity will come to wors 11p o , 111 t 1e land of the setting sun . . As I entered your city, thought I, here is the peculiar home of the sla,·e; here are the descendants of Penn, the place where all men were ~J:clared to be born equal. Methought, in a sort of reverie, 1 saw a band ?f fu~Jtlve slaves flying from Maryland, wet with the swimming of_ rivers, famt w1th huuger; their tattered clothing told me they were the unpa1d laborers o~ the wretche_d South. They sought the place where they might tell the h1story ?f the1r wrongs. nut the doors of the noble Roman Catholic pile of arch1tectural grandeur were shut against th em; they went to the l\l cthodists' chapel, because their discipline was written by John \Vesley, who loved the slave; but they were a nswered "our Bishops cannot li sten to the tales of slaves; it is a political question, we cannot unite church ancl state ;"-to the naplists, but they could not think of giving oO'ence to .their. Georgi~ brethren i to the Episcopalians, but the man in canonicals sa1d, "1t was h1s pleasure and his pride to say, his church had never been aO"ected by .ullraism;"they turned to the Presbyterians, who would have opened the1r church, as they said, "but from fear of disobliging a majority of the next G.e~er~l Assembly, who might want their house in which to denounce the .aboh.tJOnlsts ;" but directed them to the Quakers, who had always been the1r fnends, and to their sympathies they commended them. To the Friends they bent the~r faltering and wretched steps--but were told "they had always been the1r friends, and neither ate nor wore the slave's productions, but hoped no stronger test would be required of them, for as to opening their meeting houses to Ji sten to the story of their wrongs, they did not feel free to do it." Oh, mi~erable fugitives !-They have run the round of sectarian church~ humanity ; none have bidden them welcome. 11 L et us" they said, 11 go to the Hall of Independence, and see if the ghosts of Hancock, and Rush, and Franklin still hover there?" Dut the door of that old Hall was barred and bolted by a generation who knew not Joseph. They were told " it will not do to talk about your scourged backs, broken hearts, unpaid labor, severed families, ravished wives, and murdered sons; that is a part of the compact; and if we of the North .should listen to you, the two hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders would knock this Union into fragments, so there would not be enough left of our common country to make a school district. Get you gone, there is no place for you here." . . They have turned away in despair. But what sudden change of JOY ~s passing over their sad countenances ? They have heard of this Hall-th1s Temple of Liberty built for the very purpose of giving a hearing to. the wrongs of the afflicted, those who have none to help, those about to pensh! And here we are, thank God! this day, in the first temple ever erected to the memory and redress of the slave's wrongs, since this world began !This is a new place under the sun. It is pity's home, the abode of enlightened humanity. This is a temple dedicated to the insulted and outraged of our land. This will be their future court and senate house, where their hitherto . untold wrongs shall come up in holy remembrance before God, while the means for their deliverance shall be considered in the ample range of free discuss ion, unfettered by priest, deacon, people, or trustee~. No house was ever erected for a more noble or glorious purpose-there IS not one on whose roof the sun of Heaven shines, from the Chinese temp~e of a hundred bells to the pagoda of India, from the mosque of St. Sophta tsl'BECH OF ALVAN STt:WART. 113 to St. Paul's from the cathedral of Milan to that of "\'Vestminster, around which the s;mpathies of noble hearts and the prayers of the poor will gather, aa around this Hall dedicated to the Rights of Man! This is the home of the stranger, the resting-place of the fugitive, the slave's audience-chamber. H ere the cause of the slave, the Seminole, and the Cherokee shall be heard. H ere, on th i~ rostrum, the advocates of holy justice, and Heaven-descended humauity, shall s taud and plead for poor ins ulted man; here with boiJness shall they untwist the guilty texture of those laws which from generation to generation have bound men in the dungeons of despair. Here, too, shall crim inal expediency be hung up to anation's scorn and the world's contempt; that expediency which adjusts political balances with the tears · and blood of slaves, or sees a nation made homeless and exiled beyond the Mississippi for the purpose of securing its goh.len mines. Here shall the good cause come, though excluded from sectari an churches; here the despised form of shrunken humanity swells beyond the measure of its chains, as it ascends and seats it~elf beneath this Uome, and feels itself enlarged by su rrounding compassion. This Temple of J .. iberty, I trust, will stand as a monument of honor to its: founders, a s tanding reproach to the generation of this country in the thirty-ninth year of the nineteenth century- a generation, whose House of Representatives, in Congress, could resolve that all petitions on the subject. of s lavery should lie on its table, "unread, unprinted, unreferred, undobated, and uncousidcretl,"-a generation, who, in a fundamental act of constitutional and organic law, could strike from its roll of voters, in the primary assemblies, forty tholl sand freemen, because of their complexion,-a generation whose moral cowardice, only exceeded by their deliberate treachery to the rights of man, forced a nece!sity upon the true lovers of man and worshippers of God to erect this building, as a home where Truth might commune with her admirers, Patriotism with her followers, and Humanity with her friends. Let this Hall be like a moral furnace, in which the fires of free discussion shall burn night and day, and purifY public opinion of the base alloy of expediency, and all tho!:le inversions of truth, by which firs t principles are .::~urrendered in subserviency to popular prejudice, or crime ! Let the gratitude of every lover of his country be expressed towards the gentlemen, who, in erecting this builtling, have in the most solemn manner rebuked a gu ilty age. As brick after IJrick shall lllOulder away, max the coming generations of mankind furnish men who sh~ll restore the _pen shed brick, the time-worn stone, anti wastetl wood of thas temple, unlil wrong and crime shall be IJanished from our country, and the eye of the Angel of Freedom, gazing over its vast extent uf territory, from the St. Croix to the Mexican Uulf, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, looks down upon no slave ! "WHEN the speaker had taken his seat a penson rose, by the nam ~ of EDwARDs, a stra nger to us, and asked permission to correct an error m.to which some of the speakers, d uring the Dedication, had fallen. H e satd he was not a Roman Catholic, but he believed them to be as much the friends of Liberty as the other denominations of Christians; and could point to indi viduals in Great Britain, belo nging to th:'lt sect, w.ho ha~l been very active in the anti-slavery cause. It was, therefore, unfaar to 1mply , as he thought some of the speakers !taU done, that the Roman Catholics 15 |