[57]
leave to posterity a memory which will blacken through all future time, a legacy of infamy.
‘Let us not betake us to the common arts and stratagems of nations, but fear God, and put away the evil which provokes Him; and trust not in man, but in the living God; and it shall go well for England!’
This counsel, given by the purehearted William Penn, in a former age, is about to be followed in the present.
An intense and powerful feeling is working in the mighty heart of England; it is speaking through the lips of Brougham and Buxton and O'Connell, and demanding justice in the name of humanity and according to the righteous law of God.
The immediate emancipation of eight hundred thousand slaves is demanded with an authority which cannot much longer be disputed or trifled with.
That demand will be obeyed; justice will be done; the heavy burdens will be unloosed; the oppressed set free.
It shall go well for England.
And when the stain on our own escutcheon shall be seen no more; when the Declaration of our Independence and the practice of our people shall agree; when truth shall be exalted among us; when love shall take the place of wrong; when all the baneful pride and prejudice of caste and color shall fall forever; when under one common sun of political liberty the slave-holding portions of our republic shall no longer sit, like the Egyptians of old, themselves mantled in thick darkness, while all around them is glowing with the blessed light of freedom and equality, then, and not till then, shall it go well for America I
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