olished by
positive legislation. If the order of nature has been departed from, and
a forced and artificial state of things introduced, it has been, as the
experience of all the world declares, by them and not by us.

That there are great evils in a society where slavery exists, and that
the institution is liable to great abuse, I have already said. To say
otherwise, would be to say that they were not human. But the whole of
human life is a system of evils and compensations. We have no reason to
believe that the compensations with us are fewer, or smaller in
proportion to the evils, than those of any other condition of society.
Tell me of an evil or abuse; of an instance of cruelty, oppression,
licentiousness, crime or suffering, and I will point out, and often in
five fold degree, an equivalent evil or abuse in countries where slavery
does not exist.

Let us examine without blenching, the actual and alleged evils of
slavery, and the array of horrors which many suppose to be its universal
concomitants. It is said that the slave is out of the protection of the
law; that if the law purports to protect him in life and limb, it is but
imperfectly executed; that he is still subject to excessive labor,
degrading blows, or any other sort of torture, which a master pampered
and brutalized by the exercise of arbitrary power, may think proper to
inflict; he is cut off from the opportunity of intellectual, moral, or
religious improvement, and even positive enactments are directed against
his acquiring the rudiments of knowledge; he is cut off forever from the
hope of raising his condition in society, whatever may be his merit,
talents, or virtues, and therefore deprived of the strongest incentive
to useful and praiseworthy exertion; his physical degradation begets a
corresponding moral degradation: he is without moral principle, and
addicted to the lowest vices, particularly theft and falsehood; if
marriage be not disallowed, it is little better than a state of
concubinage, from which results general licentiousness, and the want of
chastity among females--this indeed is not protected by law, but is
subject to the outrages of brutal lust; both sexes are liable to have
their dearest affections violated; to be sold like brutes; husbands to
be torn from wives, children from parents;--this is the picture commonly
presented by the denouncers of slavery.

It is a somewhat singular fact that when there existed in our State no
law for p