ble enjoins, and which tend to produce
universal intelligence, virtue, liberty and equality, without violence
and sudden change, and which thus secure private and public prosperity,
stand aloof from the abolitionists, not merely because they disapprove
of their spirit and mode of action, but because they do not admit their
fundamental principle.

In the third place, the error in question prevents the adoption of the
most effectual means of extinguishing slavery. These means are not the
opinions or feelings of the non-slaveholding States, nor the
denunciations of the holders of slaves, but the improvement,
intellectual and moral, of the slaves themselves. Slavery has but two
natural and peaceful modes of death. The one is the increase of the
slave population until it reaches the point of being unproductive. When
the number of slaves becomes so great that the master can not profitably
employ them, he manumits them in self-defense. This point would probably
have been reached long ago, in many of the Southern States, had not the
boundless extent of the south-western section of the Union presented a
constant demand for the surplus hands. Many planters in Virginia and
Maryland, whose principles or feelings revolt at the idea of selling
their slaves to the South, find that their servants are gradually
reducing them to poverty, by consuming more than they produce. The
number, however, of slaveholders who entertain these scruples is
comparatively small. And as the demand for slave labor in the still
unoccupied regions of the extreme south-west is so great, and is likely
to be so long continued, it is hopeless to think of slavery dying out by
becoming a public burden. The other natural and peaceful mode of
extinction, is the gradual elevation of the slaves in knowledge, virtue,
and property to the point at which it is no longer desirable or possible
to keep them in bondage.[272] Their chains thus gradually relax, until
they fall off entirely. It is in this way that Christianity has
abolished both political and domestic bondage, whenever it has had free
scope. It enjoins a fair compensation for labor; it insists on the moral
and intellectual improvement of all classes of men; it condemns all
infractions of marital or parental rights; in short, it requires not
only that free scope should be allowed to human improvement, but that
all suitable means should be employed for the attainment of that end.
The feudal system, as before remar