that your
efforts to suppress it, have affected _nothing more_ than a
three-fold increase of its horrors. There is a God who rules this
world--all-powerful--far-seeing: He does not permit his creatures to
foil his designs. It is he who, for his all-wise, though to us often
inscrutable purposes, throws "impossibilities" in the way of our fondest
hopes and most strenuous exertions. Can you doubt this?

Experience having settled the point, that this trade _can not be
abolished by the use of force_, and that blockading squadrons serve only
to make it more profitable and more cruel, I am surprised that the
attempt is persisted in, unless it serves as a cloak to other purposes.
It would be far better than it now is, for the African, if the trade was
free from all restrictions, and left to the mitigation and decay which
time and competition would surely bring about. If kidnapping, both
secretly, and by war made for the purpose, could be by any means
prevented in Africa, the next greatest blessing you could bestow upon
that country would be to transport its actual slaves in comfortable
vessels across the Atlantic. Though they might be perpetual bondsmen,
still they would emerge from darkness into light--from barbarism into
civilization--from idolatry to Christianity--in short from death to
life.

But let us leave the African slave trade, which has so signally defeated
the _philanthropy_ of the world, and turn to American slavery, to which
you have now directed your attention, and against which a crusade has
been preached as enthusiastic and ferocious as that of Peter the
Hermit--destined, I believe, to be about as successful. And here let me
say, there is a vast difference between the two, though you may not
acknowledge it. The wisdom of ages has concurred in the justice and
expediency of establishing rights by prescriptive use, however tortuous
in their origin they may have been. You would deem a man insane, whose
keen sense of equity would lead him to denounce your right to the lands
you hold, and which perhaps you inherited from a long line of ancestry,
because your title was derived from a Saxon or Norman conqueror, and
your lands were originally wrested by violence from the vanquished
Britons. And so would the New England abolitionists regard any one who
would insist that he should restore his farm to the descendants of the
slaughtered red men, to whom God had as clearly given it as he gave life
and freedom to the kidna