OF NEW YORK. (BORN 1813, DIED 1887.)

ADDRESS AT LIVERPOOL, OCTOBER 16, 1863


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's 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 was 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; and now since I
have been in England, although I have met with greater kindness and
courtesy on the part of most than I deserved, yet, on the other hand, I
perceive that the Southern influence prevails to some extent in England.
[Applause and uproar.] It is my old acquaintance; I understand it
perfectly--[laughter]--and I have always held it to be an unfailing
truth that where a man had a cause that would bear examination he was
perfectly willing to have it spoken about. [Applause.] And when
in Manchester I saw those huge placards: "Who is Henry Ward
Beecher?"--[laughter, cries of "Quite right," and applause.]--and
when in Liverpool I was told that there were those blood-red placards,
purporting to say what Henry Ward Beecher had said, and calling upon
Englishmen to suppress free speech--I tell you what I thought. I thought
simply this: "I am glad of it." [Laughter.] Why? Because if they had felt
perfectly secure, that you are the minions of the South and the slaves