ity not by prostrating trees of
all sizes to the ground, but by securing to all the opportunity of
growing, and by causing all to grow, until the original disparity is no
longer perceptible. All attempts, by human wisdom, to frame society, of
a sudden, after a pattern cut by the rule of abstract rights, have
failed; and whether they had failed or not, they can never be urged as a
matter of moral obligation. It is not enough, therefore, in order to
prove the sinfulness of slaveholding, to show that it interferes with
the natural rights of a portion of the community. It is in this respect
analagous to all other social institutions. They are all of them
encroachments on human rights, from the freest democracy to the most
absolute despotism.

It is further to be remarked, that all these rights suppose
corresponding duties, and where there is an incompetence for the duty,
the claim to exercise the right ceases. No man can justly claim the
exercise of any right to the injury of the community of which he is a
member. It is because females and minors are judged (though for
different reasons), incompetent to the proper discharge of the duties of
citizenship, that they are deprived of the right of suffrage. It is on
the same principle that a large portion of the inhabitants of France and
England are deprived of the same privilege. As it is acknowledged that
the slaves may be justly deprived of political rights, on the ground of
their incompetency to exercise them without injury to the community, it
must be admitted, by parity of reason, that they may be justly deprived
of personal freedom, if incompetent to exercise it with safety to
society. If this be so, then slavery is a question of circumstances, and
not a _malum in se_. It must be borne in mind that the object of these
remarks is not to prove that the American, the British, or the Russian
form of society, is expedient or otherwise; much less to show that the
slaves in this country are actually unfit for freedom, but simply to
prove that the mere fact that slaveholding interferes with natural
rights, is not enough to justify the conclusion that it is necessarily
and universally sinful.

Another very common and plausible argument on this subject is, that a
man can not be made a matter of property. He can not be degraded into a
brute or chattel, without the grossest violation of duty and propriety;
and that as slavery confers this right of property in human beings, it
must,