A Discourse for the Time, delivered January 4, 1852 in the First Congregational Unitarian Church

American Slavery has much to answer for; but if it adds this to the mountain of its iniquities, if it is the cause why the hope of bleeding and fettered Europe is blasted, if it break the noble heart of Hungary's devoted servant and chief, and more than all, if it cause him to falter in the cause of universal humanity, what tongue now silent will not join in execrating it? what heart, hitherto cold, will not consecrate itself to the work of its abolition?

The nations of the old world, degraded, trampled upon, and bleeding under the relentless feet of arbitrary power, long and pray for emancipation. The glorious vision of Liberty flits before their aching sight. They stretch out their hearts and hands to us. But the supporters of the old and oppressive forms of government sneer at our boasted universal freedom, as well they may, and point to our millions of bondmen. They can say, with truth, that Liberty does not exist here or anywhere as a realized fact; that it is a chimera and an abstraction, utterly impracticable; that the people are longing for a dream that has never been and can never be fulfilled. Neither the foreign oppressor, nor the foreign oppressed have any foundation in fact for the faith and the hope of liberty; and much I fear we should do little for the deliverance of other nations, even if, as we now stand, clinging to Slavery, we were actually to intervene in their behalf. If we saw any chance of strengthening and extending our 'domestic institution,' we might in that case be ready enough to give them our help.

O how plain is it that the one thing which the world claims of us, the one thing that the great Hungarian has to ask of us, for his own people and for all Europe, is that we should prove that Liberty without Slavery is a practicable thing. Let this fact be realized, and the world's redemption is sure. Show mankind twenty-five millions of human beings, living together under such free and simple institutions as ours, with not a single slave among them, and then all that we need do is done, and our simple existence as a nation becomes an irresistible intervention against the violation of human rights. To induce us to do this, the Hungarian patriot may well go down on those knees which he would not bend to Emperor or Czar, and adjure us for the love of God and man, by all the dearest hopes and interests of the human race, by the great name of the holy Jesus, to make our liberty complete, to redeem our long-violated pledge, to wipe away the blot that eclipses the sun of our Freedom, and prove, as we may, that all men are children of one Father, brethren of one household, born to the glorious liberty of the sons of the living God. If, in any way, he should be the means in the hands of a gracious Providence of inducing us to do this, he will do more for us than we could do for him, though we were to place all the gold of the East, and of the West, at his disposal.