ever offended him; captivating and carrying them
into slavery, in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in
their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of
infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain,
determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold; he
has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt
to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce; and that this
assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now
exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase
that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon
whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed
against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to
commit against the lives of another."

Such was the paragraph which had been inserted by Jefferson, in the
virulence of his democracy, and his desire to hold up to detestation the
king of Great Britain. Such was at that time, unfortunately, the truth;
and had the paragraph remained, and at the same time emancipation been
given to the slaves, it would have been a lasting stigma upon George the
Third. But the paragraph was expunged; and why I because they could not
hold up to public indignation the sovereign whom they had abjured,
without reminding the world that slavery still existed in a community
which had declared that "all men were equal;" and that if, in a monarch,
they had stigmatised it as "violating the most sacred rights of life and
liberty," and "waging cruel war against human nature," they could not
have afterward been so barefaced and unblushing as to continue a system
which was at variance with every principle which they professed.

Note. Miss Martineau, in her admiration of democracy, says, that, in
the formation of the government, "The rule by which they worked was no
less than the golden one, which seems to have been, by some unlucky
chance, omitted in the Bibles of other statesmen, `_Do unto others as ye
would that they should do unto you_'" I am afraid the American Bible, by
some unlucky chance, has also omitted that precept.

It does, however, satisfactorily prove, that the question of slavery was
not _overlooked_; on the contrary, their determination to take advantage
of the system was deliberate, and, there can be no doubt, well
considered--the very omission of the paragraph proves it. I