American generosity and Christianity, and Africa redeemed.
People of the North, your piety and patriotism, your interest and good sense, combine to rally you, or the most of you, around all harmonizing measures, needed to tighten the bonds of our confederation, and you try hard to persuade yourselves that slavery is not such a bad thing after all. But in your inner heart you hate the institution of slavery, and you would not deserve to have such a day as this in your annals if you did not hate it. But it becomes you, in dealing with this subject, to seek the broadest and most comprehensive views, and above all, to be guided by an intelligent Christian love. There are ways of shaking a tree which only makes it drive its roots deeper into the earth. I feel confident in declaring that in principle and policy, the colonization movement furnishes a safe, and the only safe, guide. Attempting to act upon slavery in any other spirit, and on any other principles, is unwise, useless, and Utopian, aye, it is ruinous. The old fable here is just in place. The wind and sun vied with each other to strip the cloak from the traveller. The wind raged and stormed, but the traveller the more resolutely wrapped his cloak around him. As soon as the wind ceased its blowing, the sun came out with its smiling face and gentle beams, and the traveller laid off his cloak for his own comfort and convenience. Abolitionism is the wind, Colonization is the sun.
Abolitionism has never caused the honest emancipation of a single slave, has in no single particular
