The committee have had their previous convictions confirmed, and their
hearts deeply affected, by your vivid and faithful delineations of
slavery; and they desire to join with thousands on both sides of the
Atlantic, who offer fervent thanksgiving to God for having endowed you
with those rare gifts, which have qualified you for producing the
noblest testimony against slavery, next to the Bible, which the world
has ever received.

While giving all the praise to God, from whom cometh every good and
perfect gift, they may be excused for mentioning three characteristics
of your writings regarding slavery, which awakened their admiration--a
sensibility befitting the anguish of suffering millions; the graphic
power which presents to view the complex and hideous system, stripped of
all its deceitful disguises; and the moral courage that was required to
encounter the monster, and drag it forth to the gaze and the execration
of mankind.

The committee feel humbled in being called to confess and deplore, as
existing among ourselves, another species of slavery, not less ruinous
in its tendency, and not less criminal in the sight of God--we mean the
slavery by strong drink. We feel too much ashamed of the sad preëminence
which these nations have acquired in regard to this vice to take any
offence at the reproaches cast upon us from across the Atlantic. Such
smiting shall not break our head. We are anxious to profit by it. Yet
when it is used as an argument to justify slavery, or to silence our
respectful but earnest remonstrances, we take exception to the
parallelism on which these arguments are made to rest. We do not justify
our slavery. We do not try to defend it from the Scriptures. We do not
make laws to uphold it. The unhappy victims of our slavery have all