from its very nature, be a crime. We acknowledge the correctness
of the principle on which this argument is founded, but deny that it is
applicable to the case in hand. We admit that it is not only an
enormity, but an impossibility, that a man should be made a thing, as
distinguished from a rational and moral being. It is not within the
compass of human law to alter the nature of God's creatures. A man must
be regarded and treated as a rational being, even in his greatest
degradation. That he is, in some countries and under some institutions,
deprived of many of the rights and privileges of such a being, does not
alter his nature. He must be viewed as a man under the most atrocious
system of slavery that ever existed. Men do not arraign and try on
evidence, and punish on conviction, either things or brutes. Yet slaves
are under a regular system of laws which, however unjust they may be,
recognize their character as accountable beings. When it is inferred
from the fact that the slave is called the property of his master, that
he is thereby degraded from his rank as a human being, the argument
rests on the vagueness of the term _property_. Property is the right of
possession and use, and must of necessity vary according to the nature
of the objects to which it attaches. A man has property in his wife, in
his children, in his domestic animals, in his fields and in his forests.
That is, he has the right to the possession and use of these several
objects, according to their nature. He has no more right to use a brute
as a log of wood, in virtue of the right of property, than he has to use
a man as a brute. There are general principles of rectitude, obligatory
on all men, which require them to treat all the creatures of God
according to the nature which he has given them. The man who should burn
his horse because he was his property, would find no justification in
that plea, either before God or man. When, therefore, it is said that
one man is the property of another, it can only mean that the one has a
right to use the other _as a man_, but not as a brute, or as a thing. He
has no right to treat him as he may lawfully treat his ox, or a tree. He
can convert his person to no use to which a human being may not, by the
laws of God and nature, be properly applied. When this idea of property
comes to be analyzed, it is found to be nothing more than a claim of
service either for life or for a term of years. This claim is
transferabl