Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/29

 BEECHER

HIS SPEECH IN LIVERPOOL*

��Bom In 1813, died in 1887; Pastor of churches in Indiana in 1837-47, and of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn in 1847-87; Founder and Editor of The Christian Union in 1870-81: one of the most prominent of antislavery orators; made notable speeches in England during the American Civil War.

For more than twenty-five years I have been made perfectly familiar with popular assemblies in all parts of my country except the extreme south. There has not for the whole of that time been a single day of my life when it would have been safe for me to go south of Mason and Dixon's line in my own country, and all for one reason : my solemn, earnest, persistent testimony against that which I consider to be the most atrocious thing under the sun — the system of American slavery in a great, free republic. [Cheers.] I have passed through that early period when right of free speech w^as denied to me. Again and again I have attempted to address audiences that, for no other crime than that of free speech, visited me with all manner of contumelious epithets;

> Delivered in Liverpool on October 16, 1863, when his audience became repeatedly little more than a shouting mob, tempered by ponodical exhaustion, so strong were its sympathies with the Southern cause. Abridged.

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