Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/82

76 fulfilled, if it contributed in any measure towards averting the evils which it was formed to avert, every member of it will have cause to look back with thankfulness to his connection with it; and we have all reason to be grateful to our President and to others who at the critical moment organised us and directed our efforts, not without labour, not without sacrifices, not I fear without incurring some of the penalties which men incur by boldly separating from those around them on a question of principle; for all which I trust the recollection of the good they have done and the evil they have prevented will make them full amends. And especially is the gratitude of all in this place, and of society at large, due to those who have shown by the course they have taken in this question, that the interests of the great employer are not really opposed, and that his sympathies ought not to be opposed, to those of the working man. That hour of Federal despair was a testing hour. It searched the convictions of all classes and of all men, and severed the counterfeit liberalism from the true.

In concluding let us return for a moment to a part of the subject as to which we have always hoped that, in spite of sinister appearances, there could be no real division of sentiment among the English people. There can surely be few Englishmen, few fellow-countrymen of Pitt and Wilberforce, to whom the Abolition of Slavery, however accomplished, is not in itself welcome. Here we may meet again, and rejoice again to meet, many from whom we have been divided on other grounds. Since the advent of Christianity itself, few more blessed announcements have been made to man than this, that Slavery is dead, dead in its only great stronghold, and therefore virtually dead