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Show 120 ntend that he should be immediately set free from all his present restraints. By no means. Nothing is farther from my thoughts. The slave cannot rightfully and should not be owned by the Individual. But, like every other citizen, he belongs to the Community, he is subject to the community, and the community has a right and is bound to continue all such restraints, as its own safety and the well-being of the slave demand. It would be cruelty, not kindness, to the latter to give him a freedom, which he is unprepared to understand or enjoy. It would be cruelty to strike the fetters from a man, whose first steps would infallibly lead him to a precipice. The slave should not have an owner, but he should have a guardian. He needs authority, to supply the lack of that discretion which he has not yet attained ; but it should be the authority of a friend; an official authority, conferred by the state, and for which there should be responsibleness to the state, an authority especially designed to prepare its subjects for personal freedom. The slave should not, in the fi•·st instance, be allowed to wander at his will beyond the plantation on which he toils; and if he cannot be induced to work by rational and natlll'al motives, he should be obliged to labor ; on the same principles on which the vag•·ant in other communities is confined and compelled to earn his bread. The gift of liberty would be a mere name, and 121 worse than nominal, were he to be let loose on society under circumstances d1·iving him to crimes, for which he would be condemned to severer bondage than he had escaped. Many restraints must be continued ; but continued, not because the colored race are property, not because they are bound to live and toil for an owner, but solely and wholly because their own innocence, security, and education, and the public order and peace, require them, during the present incapacity, to be restrained. It should be remembered, that this incapacity is not their faul t, but their misfortune; that not they, but the community, are responsible for it; and that the community cannot without crime profit by its own wrong. If the government should make any distinctions among the citizens, it should be in behalf of the injured. Inst<!ad of urging the past existence of slavery, and the incapacity which it has induced, as apologies or reasons for continuing the yoke, the community should find in these very circumstances new obligations to effort for !he wronged. There is but one weighty argument against immediate emancipation, namely, that the slave would not support himself and his children by honest industry; that, having always worked on compulsion, he will not work without it; that, having always labored from another's will, he will not labor from his own _; that there is no spring of |
