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Show 44 lt~!ed by Slavery. 'Ve bave no such power. Slavery exists. There are more than two millions of slaves among us. What can be done ! To keep them in Slavery is an evil, but not the unmiti-g; ated evil which it is represented by the overstrained sensibility of enthusiasts. Heaven in its mercy never permits such unalloyed evil to exist. The slaves as a class are better fed, better clad, less worked, and have less care and anxiety about their condition, than a great proportion of the hard working day-laborers in freedom. As they are deemed to be property there is no inducement to treat them inhumanly. If the work which they perform is to be performed by anybody, it is not probable that it could be done with less physical suffering than it is by the slaves. Our humanity need not be pained on this account.* Still the evils of Slavery are very great. ·what would be the evils of abolition. First the war, bloodshed and crime, by which it is to be se-cured. In the present condition of things no man, who retains his common sense, whatever his wishes may be, can for a moment believe that the slaves of the United States will eve1· become free by the consent of their masters. vVhen the crisis arrives it is to be accomplished in blood. I will not enlarge on this topic. It is too painful. He who can for a moment contemplate the white men and white women of our Southern States in the hands of their negroes, ignorant, frantic, lustful and ferocious, and feel any satisfaction that by these means their liberty is to be secured to them, must have very strange notions of Christian morality. If, however, by some supernatural operation- which is too * It is douhtful if a child was ever in the slave country compcllctl to eat its own f:cccs, as was Jlroved in Pike's case at Salem; or was subjected to the punishment of Lcing tied under ilH arms and suspended in the vault of a necessary, as was proved in the case of n child of ten years old, in this city, some yeaTS since. 'rhe case of \Vashhuru vs. Knight, tried in our Supreme Court, was unc<iualled for a r;;crics of cruelties which were proved, to the absolute lwrror of the jury. A man who would not harm a horse because he i~ hig property, will sometimes delight in torturing :l fellow-being, in whose existence he bas no 1~tcuniary interest. There are tyrants everywhere. 45 fanciful to be made the subject of speculation - the owners would consent to give them up, and by a like miracle they could acquire the means of understanding the value of freedom, there are yet other evils of vastly more amount than the present evils of Slavery. S uppose them to emerge from Slavery, intelligent, moral and industrious, with all the capacity and inclinations of the white man. They would be negroes still. Two distinct classes of men could not live upon terms of equality in the same country and under the same government. The more their intelligence, the greater would be the mutual hostility of the two races; and the final possession of power would be the result of a war of extermination, in which one or the other race would perish. Is It supposed they could amalgamate ! God forbid ! This is a matter of sentiment and taste, to be sure, upon which the f~elings ar~ to be umpires. There arc those who sec nothing disgustmg 111 such an idea. But I fearlessly aver that if this be the tendency and the result of om moral reformation rather than our white Saxon race should degenerate into a iribe of tawney-colored Quadroons, rather than that om fair and beauteous fem~les should give birth to the thick-lipped, woollyheaded ch1ldren of Afncan fathers, rather than the nice and delicate character of the American woman, which in its freshnes~ and its pride is at once the cause and the consequence ofeivihzalion, should be debased and degraded by such indiscnnunate and beastly connexion, rather than tbe negro should be seated m the halls of Congress and his sooty complexion gl~re upon us from the bench of justice, rather than he should mmgle wttb us in the familiar intercourse of domestic life and tam! the atmosphere of our homes and firesides,_ I WILL BRAVE MY SHARE OF ALL THE RESPONSIBILITY OF KEEPING IIIM IN SLAVERY. |