,--answer, is this a thing
for you to protect and countenance? And you, mothers of America,--you
who have learned, by the cradles of your own children, to love and feel
for all mankind,--by the sacred love you bear your child; by your joy
in his beautiful, spotless infancy; by the motherly pity and tenderness
with which you guide his growing years; by the anxieties of his
education; by the prayers you breathe for his soul's eternal good;--I
beseech you, pity the mother who has all your affections, and not one
legal right to protect, guide, or educate, the child of her bosom! By
the sick hour of your child; by those dying eyes, which you can never
forget; by those last cries, that wrung your heart when you could
neither help nor save; by the desolation of that empty cradle, that
silent nursery,--I beseech you, pity those mothers that are constantly
made childless by the American slave-trade! And say, mothers of America,
is this a thing to be defended, sympathized with, passed over in
silence?

Do you say that the people of the free state have nothing to do with it,
and can do nothing? Would to God this were true! But it is not true. The
people of the free states have defended, encouraged, and participated;
and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South, in that they
have not the apology of education or custom.

If the mothers of the free states had all felt as they should, in times
past, the sons of the free states would not have been the holders, and,
proverbially, the hardest masters of slaves; the sons of the free states
would not have connived at the extension of slavery, in our national
body; the sons of the free states would not, as they do, trade the
souls and bodies of men as an equivalent to money, in their mercantile
dealings. There are multitudes of slaves temporarily owned, and sold
again, by merchants in northern cities; and shall the whole guilt or
obloquy of slavery fall only on the South?

Northern men, northern mothers, northern Christians, have something more
to do than denounce their brethren at the South; they have to look to
the evil among themselves.

But, what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge.
There is one thing that every individual can do,--they can see to it
that _they feel right_. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles
every human being; and the man or woman who _feels_ strongly, healthily
and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a const