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Show Qi:ge \tllilz nf <!Loloniptiolt I SPEAK tlJC words of soberness and truth when I say, that the most inveterate, the most formidable, the deadliest enemy of the peace, prosperity, and happiness of the colored population of the United States, is that system of African colonization which originated in and is perpetuated by a worldly, Pharoah-like policy beneath the dignity of a magnan· imous and Christian people ;-a system which receives much of its vitality from ad captandum appeals to popular prejudices, and to the unholy, grovelling passions of the canaille ;~a system that interposes every possible obstacle in the way of the improvement and elevation of the colored man in the land of his birth ;-that instigates the enactment of laws whose design and tendency ·arc obviously to annoy him, to make him feel, while at ho;ne, that he is a stranger THE EVILS OF COLONIZATION. 199 and a pilgrim-nay morc,-to make him "wretched, and miserable, and poor, and. blind, and naked ;"-to make him "a hissing and a by-word," "a fugitive and a vagabond" throughout the American Union ;-a system that is so irreconcilably opposed to the purpose of God in making "of one blood all nations for to dwell on all the face of the earth," that when the dying slaveholder, under the lashes of a guilty conscience, would give to his slaves unqualified freedom, it wickedly interposes, and persuades him that "to do justly and love mercy" would be to inflict an irreparable injury upon the community, and that to do his duty to God and his fellow-creatures, under the circumstJ. nccs, he should bequeath to hjs surviving slaves the cruel altcrn~tive of m:ther expatr£ation to a far-off, pestilential clime, with the prospect of a premature death, or perpetual slavery, with its untold horrors, in ln's r.ative land. Against this most iniquitous system of persecution and proscription of an inoffensive people, for no other reason than that we wear the physical exterior given us in in.finite wisdom and benevolence, I would recprd, nay engrave with the pen of a diamond, my most emphatic and solemn protest; more especially would I do so, as the system, under |