rnal good. He everywhere insists that such is the
duty of slaveholders; and if such be their duty, they surely have no
right to violate it, by crushing the intellectual and moral nature of
those whom they are bound to elevate in the scale of being. If the
slaveholder, then, should adopt such an argument, his logic would be
very justly chargeable by Dr. Wayland with evidencing not so much the
existence of a clear head as of a bad heart.

In the second place, the above argument overlooks the fact that the
Southern statesman vindicates the institution of slavery on the ground
that it finds the Negro race already so degraded as to unfit it for a
state of freedom. He does not argue that it is right to seize those who,
by the possession of cultivated intellects and pure morals, are fit for
freedom, and debase them in order to prepare them for social bondage. He
does not imagine that it is ever right to shoot, burn, or corrupt, in
order to reduce any portion of the enlightened universe to a state of
servitude. He merely insists that those only who are already unfit for a
higher and nobler state than one of slavery, should be held by society
in such a state. This position, although it is so prominently set forth
by every advocate of slavery at the South, is almost invariably
overlooked by the Northern abolitionists. They talk, and reason, and
declaim, indeed, just as if we had caught a bevy of black angels as they
were winging their way to some island of purity and bliss here upon
earth, and reduced them from their heavenly state, by the most
diabolical cruelties and oppressions, to one of degradation, misery, and
servitude. They forget that Africa is not yet a paradise, and that
Southern servitude is not quite a hell. They forget--in the heat and
haste of their argument they forget--that the institution of slavery is
designed by the South not for the enlightened and the free, but only for
the ignorant and the debased. They need to be constantly reminded that
the institution of slavery is not the mother, but the daughter, of
ignorance and degradation. It is, indeed, the legitimate offspring of
that intellectual and moral debasement which, for so many thousand
years, has been accumulating and growing upon the African race. And if
the abolitionists at the North will only invent some method by which all
this frightful mass of degradation may be blotted out _at once_, then
will we most cheerfully consent to "the _immediate_ abolitio