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Show 48 LIBERTY AND SLAVERY. your wife and children, 'oblige them to labor for my benefit without their contract or consent.' Suppose, moreover, aware that I could not thus oblige them, unless they were inferior in intellect to myself, I should forbid them to read, and thus consign them to intellectual and moral imbecility. Suppose I should measure out to them the knowledge of God on the same principle. Suppose I should exercise this dominion over them and their children as long as I lived, and then do all in my power to render it certain that my children should exercise it after me. The question before us I suppose to be simply this: Would I, in so doing, act at variance with the relations existing between us as creatures of God? Would I, in other words, violate the supreme law of my Creator, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself? or that other, Whatsoever yc would that meu should do unto you, do ye even so unto them? I do not see how any intelligent creature can give more than one answer to this question. Then I think that every intelligent creature must affirm that to do this is wrong, or, lll the other form of expression, that it is a great moral evil. Can we conceive of any greater?" It was surely very kind in Dr. Wayland to undertake, with so much pains, to instruct us ARGUMENTS OF ABOLITIONISTS. 49 poor, benighted sons of the South in regard to the difference between right and wrong. We would fain give him full credit for all the kindly feeling he so freely professes for his "Southern brethren;" but if he really thinks that the question, whether arson, and murder, and cruelty are offences against the "supreme law of the Creator," is still open for discussion among us, then we beg leave· to inform him that he labors under a slight hallucination. If he had never written a word, we should have known, perhaps, that it is wrong for a man to set fire to his neighbor's house, and shoot him as he came out, and reduce his wife and children to a state of ignorance, degradation, and slavery. Nay, if we should find his house already burnt, and himself already shot, we should hardly feel justified in t1·cating his wife and children in so cruel a manner. Not even if they were "guilty of a skin," or ever so degraded, should we deem ourselves justified in reducing them to a state of servitude. This is NOT " the question before us." We are quite satisfied on all such points. 'l'he precept, too, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, was not altogether unknown in the Southern States before his letters were written. A committee of D |