Mr. Douglas [sic] (for that is his name) proceeded to address them:

Slavery is a question in which every human being ought to feel a deep interest. It aimed at, and accomplished, the destruction of all the rights of men. It is an enemy of the entire human family … It is a strange contradiction that in human character, that in a country that boasts to be the freest in the world, slavery exists in its worst and most aggravated forms- a country that threw off the yoke of colonial bondage for a three-penny tax on tea, proceeding upon the principle that all men were equal, and yet was the propagator of the heinous crime of slavery. It was to slavery, as it existed in the United States, I allude, and I ask that I might be permitted to speak of it, having myself endured its woes, and felt the bloody lash.

I have met with the objection that slavery exists in Ireland, and therefore there is no necessity for describing its character as found in another country (hear, hear). My answer is, if slavery exists here, it ought to be put down, and the generous in the land ought to rise and scatter its fragments to the winds (loud cheers).- But there is nothing like American slavery on the soil on which I now stand. Negro-slavery consists not in taking away a man’s property, but in making property of him, and in destroying his identity- in treating him as the beasts and creeping things. GOD has given the negro a conscience and a will, but his conscience is no monitor to him, for he has no power to exercise his will- his master decides for him not only what he should eat and what he should drink, what he should wear, when and to whom he should speak, how much he should work, how much and by whom he is to be punished- he not only decides all these things, but what is morally right and wrong. The slave must not even choose his wife, must marry and unmarry at the will of his tyrant, for the slave-holder has no compunction in separating man and wife, and thus putting asunder what GOD had joined together. Could the most inferior person in this country be so treated by the highest? If any man exists in Ireland who would so treat another, may the combined execrations of humanity fall upon him, and may he be excluded from the pale of human sympathy! …

One of the reasons why I am there to-night is that I am a fugitive from a nation of men-stealers. I do not say there are not many good men in America, but the majority of the country and the legislature is stained with blood.…

If an American ever comes among you speaking of the liberty of his country, make his cheek crimson by telling him that there is not a single spot in all his land where the sable man can stand free.