Whether I was of as much consequence as the English papers made me out to be, or not, it was easily seen, in England, that I could not be the ignorant and worthless creature, some of the American papers would have them believe I was.

Men, in their senses, do not take bowie-knives to kill mosquitoes, nor pistols to shoot flies; and the American passengers who thought proper to get up a mob to silence me, on board the "Cambria," took the most effective method of telling the British public that I had something to say.
But to the second circumstance, namely, the position of the Free Church of Scotland, with the great Doctors Chalmers, Cunningham, and Candlish at its head.

That church, with its leaders, put it out of the power of the Scotch people to ask the old question, which we in the north have often most wickedly asked--"_What have we to do with slavery_ ?" That church had taken the price of blood into its treasury, with which to build _free_ churches, and to pay _free_ church ministers for preaching the gospel; and, worse still, when honest John Murray, of Bowlien Bay--now gone to his reward in heaven--with William Smeal, Andrew Paton, Frederick Card, and other sterling anti-slavery men in Glasgow, denounced the transaction as disgraceful and shocking to the religious sentiment of Scotland, this church, through its leading divines, instead of repenting and seeking to mend the mistake into which it had fallen, made it a flagrant sin, by undertaking to defend, in the name of God and the bible, the principle not only{296} of taking the money of slave-dealers to build churches, but of holding fellowship with the holders and traffickers in human flesh.

This, the reader will see, brought up the whole question of slavery, and opened the way to its full discussion, without any agency of mine.

I have never seen a people more deeply moved than were the people of Scotland, on this very question.
Public meeting succeeded public meeting.