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| SPEECH OF MS. OA&RIBON. ' Mr. Garrison said:—Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,—For this marked expression of your personal respect, and appreciation of my labors in the cause of human freedom, and of jour esteem and friendship for the land of my nativity, I offer you, one and all, my grateful acknowledgments. But I am so profoundly impressed by the formidable array of rank, genius, intellect, scholarship, and moral and religious worth which I see before me, that I fear I shall not be able to address you, except with a fluttering pulse and a stammering tongue. For me this is, indeed, an anomalous position. Assuredly, this is treatment with which I have not been familiar. For more than thirty years, I had to look the fierce and unrelenting hostility of my countrymen in the face, with few to cheer mo onward. In nil the South I was an outlaw, and could not have gone there, though an American citizen guiltless of wrong, and though that flag (here the speaker pointed to the United States ensign) had been over my head, except at the peril of my life; nay, with the certainty of finding a bloody grave. (Hear, hear.) In all the North I was looked upon with hatred and contempt. The whole nation, subjugated to the awful power of slavery, rose up in mobocratic tumult against any and every effort to liberate the millions held in bondage on its soil. And yet I demanded nothing that was not perfectly just and reasonable, in exact accordance with the Declaration of American Independence and the Golden Rule. I was not the enemy of any man living. I cherish no personal enmities; I know nothing of them in my heart. Even whilst the Southern slave-holders were socking my destruction, I never fur a moment entertained any other feeling toward them than an earnest desire, under God, to deliver them from a deadly curse and an awful sin. (Hear, hour.) It was neither a sectional nor a personal matter at all. It had exclusive reference to the eternal law of justice between man and man, and the rights of human nature itself. Sir, I always found in America that a shower of brickbats had a remarkably tonic effect, materially strengthening to the back-bone. (Laughter.) But, sir, the shower of compliments and applause which has greeted me on this occasion would assuredly cause my heart to fail me, were it not that this generous reception is only incidentally personal to myself. (Hear, hear.) You, ladies and gentlemen, are here mainly to celebrate the triumph of humanity over its most brutal foes; to rejoice that universal emancipation has at l»st been proclaimed throughout the United States: and to express, as you have already done through the mouths of the eloquent speakers who have preceded md, sentiments of peace and of good-will toward the American Republic. Sure I am that these sentiments will be heartily reciprocated bj my countrymen. (Cheers.) |