deposit, it is also requisite that some law should be
passed compelling owners to allow a slave certain portions of time to
work out for himself, or if preferred, to work for the master, receiving
the ordinary wages for the time so employed, and this, of course, in
addition to the Sunday. As, however, among so many masters, some will be
cruel and do their utmost to negative any merciful laws which the State
may enact, I would for the protection of the slave propose that, if he
feel discontented with the treatment of his master, he be allowed to
claim the right of being publicly sold, upon giving a certain number of
days' warning of such desire on his part; or if he can find any
slave-owner who will give the price fixed by law--as before
suggested--and is willing to take him, his master to be bound to deliver
him up. With regard to the sale of slaves, I think humanity will justify
me in proposing that no slave under fifteen years of ago be sold or
transferred to another owner without the parents also; and secondly,
that husband and wife be never sold or transferred separately, except it
be by their own consent. However rarely such separations may take place
at present, there is no law to prevent the cruel act, and I have every
reason to believe it takes place much oftener than many of my
kind-hearted plantation friends would he ready to admit.

Looking forward to the gradual, but ultimately total abolition of
slavery, I would next suggest that, after a certain date--say ten
years--every slave, upon reaching thirty years of age, be apprenticed by
his master to some trade or occupation for five years, at the expiration
of which time he be free; after another fixed period--say ten
years--all slaves above twenty years of age be similarly treated; and
after a third period, I would propose that the United States should
follow the noble example long since set them by _Peru_, and make it an
integral part of their constitution that "_no one is born a slave in the
Republic."_

The next proposal I have to make is one which I cannot but hope that all
Americans will fell the propriety of, inasmuch as the present system is,
in my estimation, one of the blackest features of the institution we are
considering. I allude to the slavery of Americans themselves. In nearly
every civilized nation in the world, blood is considered to run in the
father's line, and although illegitimacy forfeits inheritance, it never
forfeits citizenship. How i