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Show 284 LIBERTY AND SLAVERY. will burst into anarchy, tl1e most frightful of nll the forms of tymnny. Shall we call this liberty? Shall we seck the secure enjoyment of natuml rights in a wild reign of lawless terror? As well might we seck the pure light of heaven in the bottomless pit. It is, indeed, a most horrible desecration of the sacred name of liberty, to apply it either to the butcheries and brutalities of the French Revolution, or to the more diabolical massacres of St. Domingo. If such were freedom, it would, in sober truth, be more fitly symbolized by ten thousand hissing 8erpents than by a single poisonous snake; and by all on earth, as in heaven, it should be ab. horred. lienee, those pretended friends and advocates of freedom, who would thus fain transmute her form divine into such horribly distorted shapes, are with her enemies confederate in dark misguided league. § V. The consequences of abolition to the South. "We have had experience enough in our own colonies," says the Prospective Review, for N ovcmber, 1852, "not to wish to see the experiment tried elsewhere on a larger scale." Now this, though it comes to us ii·om across the Atlantic, really sounds like the voice of genuine ARGUMENT FROM TilE PUBLIC GOOD. 285 philanthropy. Nor do we \\~ sh to sec the experiment, which has brought down such widespread ruin on all tho great interests of St. Domingo and the British colonies, tried in this prosperous and now beautiful land of ours. It requires no prophet to foresee the awful consequences of such an experiment on the lives, the liberties, the fortunes, and the morals, of the people of the Southern States. Let us briefly notice some of these consequences. Consider, in the first place, the vast amount of property which would be destroyed by the madness of such an experiment. According to the estimate of Mr. Clay, "the total value of the slave property in the United States is twelve hundred millions of dollars," all of which the people of the South are expected to sacrifice on the altar of abolitionism. It only moves the indignation of the abolitionist that we should for one moment hesitate. "I see," he exclaims, "in the immenseness of the value of the slaves, the enormous amount of the robbery committed on them. I see 'twelve hundred millions of dollars' seized, extorted by unrighteous force."* But, unfortunately, his * Dr. Channing's Works, vol. v. p. 47. |