He (Mr. Randolph) expressed a wish that some other gentleman had undertaken the business; but as not one had thought proper to awaken the House to a sense of their concern in it, or to point the finger of scorn at it, he would take upon him the office to do it, and to call upon the House to put a stop to proceedings at that moment carried on under their very noses; proceedings that were a crying sin before GOD and man; a practice which, he said, was not surpassed for abomination in any part of the earth; for in no part of it, not even excepting the rivers on the Coast of Africa, was there so great and so infamous a Slave Market as in the metropolis, in the very Seat of Government of the Nation, which pride itself on freedom.

Before he proceeded further, he fenced himself in against all suspicion of unduly interfering in the very delicate subject of the relation between the Slave and his owner, and to that end he remained the House that where a bill was bought in some years before to prevent the prosecution of the African Slave Trade, he had voted against it, Because it professed a principle against which it was the duty of every man of the southern or slaveholding States to set his face; for it assumed a prerogative to interfere in the right of property between the Master and his slave.

On account of that opposition he had been calumniously and falsely held up, as one of the advocates of the most disgraceful, and most infernal traffic that has ever stained the annals of the human race.

Upon another occasion, too, when a member of that House has taken upon him the lien between slave and master, he had raised his voice against him He had never directly or indirectly acquiesced in the weak and wailing plans of those who, by way of relieving the unfortunate African, would throw the States into danger; he would never weaken the form of the contract between the owner and his slave and he would never deny that the citizens of other States coming into the slaveholding States might exercise the right of ownership over the slaves they might purchase; but it was not necessary to that exercise that this city should be made a depot of slaves, who were bought either from cruel masters or kidnapped; and of those who were kidnapped, he said there were two kinds---Slaves stolen from their masters, and free persons stolen, as he might say, from themselves.

It was not necessary that we should have, here in the very streets of our new metropolis, a depot for this nefarious traffic---in comparison with which the traffic from Africa to Charleston or Jamaica was mercy, was virtue. Indeed there could be no comparison rationally instituted between taking those savages from their native wilds and tearing the civilized informed negro, habituated to cultivated life, from his master, his friends, his wife, his children, or his parents. As to the right of passing through the place, as ordinary occasions might require, it was questionable; but there was a great difference between that and making the District a depot for a systematic slave market---an assemblage of prisons where the unfortunate beings, reluctant, no doubt, to be torn from their connections, and the affections of their lives, were incarcerated and chained down, and thence driven in fetter like beasts, to be paid for like cattle.

A poor negro, by hard work and saving of his allowances, had laid by money enough to buy the freedom of his wife and child, and had paid it from time to time into the hands of his master, But the poor fellow died.The transaction was an affair of honor with the master, and the dayafter the poor fellow's death, the woman and child was sold. One fact like this spoke volumes. He repeated, that if the honorable chairman of the Committee of the District of Columbia Refused to take upon him the inquiry into this rank offence, he (Mr. R.) would himself Be among these people. He declared that he was lately mortified at being told by a foreigner of high rank, "You call this the land of liberty, and every day that passes things are done in it at which the despotisms of Europe would be horrorstruck and disgusted."