e evils which
necessarily attend its own operation, "the primeval curse of Omnipotence
upon slavery."

We have already felt in too many instances the extreme difficulty of
cherishing in one common course of national legislation the opposite
interests of republican equality and feudal aristocracy and servitude.
The truth is, we have undertaken a moral impossibility. These interests
are from their nature irreconcilable. The one is based upon the pure
principles of rational liberty; the other, under the name of freedom,
revives the ancient European system of barons and villains, nobles and
serfs. Indeed, the state of society which existed among our Anglo-Saxon
ancestors was far more tolerable than that of many portions of our
republican confederacy. For the Anglo-Saxon slaves had it in their power
to purchase their freedom; and the laws of the realm recognized their
liberation and placed them under legal protection.

(The diffusion of Christianity in Great Britain was moreover
followed by a general manumission; for it would seem that the
priests and missionaries of religion in that early and benighted age
were more faithful in the performance of their duties than those of
the present. "The holy fathers, monks, and friars," says Sir T.
Smith, "had in their confessions, and specially in their extreme and
deadly sickness, convinced the laity how dangerous a thing it was
for one Christian to hold another in bondage; so that temporal men,
by reason of the terror in their consciences, were glad to manumit
all their villains."--Hilt. Commonwealth, Blackstone, p. 52.)

To counteract the dangers resulting from a state of society so utterly at
variance with the great Declaration of American freedom should be the
earnest endeavor of every patriotic statesman. Nothing unconstitutional,
nothing violent, should be attempted; but the true doctrine of the rights
of man should be steadily kept in view; and the opposition to slavery
should be inflexible and constantly maintained. The almost daily
violations of the Constitution in consequence of the laws of some of the
slave states, subjecting free colored citizens of New England and
elsewhere, who may happen to be on board of our coasting vessels, to
imprisonment immediately on their arrival in a Southern port should be
provided against. Nor should the imprisonment of the free colored
citizens of the Northern and Middle states, o