menials and inferiors, they will then go where they will
be welcomed as citizens and rulers of a great republic. They will go
where they govern themselves, and not where they are governed or
enslaved by others. They will go where they give all the votes, and hold
all the offices, and not where their exclusion is complete. They will go
where the flag, the army, and navy, and government are theirs--and
theirs also the social position--equals among equals, peers among peers.
This they can never attain here: indeed, they will continue to
retrograde, and become a mere element of social and political agitation.
The complete success of Liberia must extinguish African slavery, here,
and throughout the world. Emigration there, is the true interest and
destiny of the negro race. Let us aid them to fulfil it. This is alike
our interest and our duty. If they have been wronged here, let us pave
their way with kindness and with gold on their return to the land of
their forefathers. Let us aid them in building up there a great nation,
which will call us blessed. Let the curse of slavery be forgotten, in
the prosperous career of a great and free Afric-American republic. Born
on our soil, let them transfer our language and institutions to Africa.
Our material progress has been marvellous; but such an act, on our part,
would indicate a moral advance, that would greatly exalt us among
nations. Every dollar thus expended, would come back to us with compound
interest, giving us also that which money cannot purchase, the
consolation of good deeds, the favor of Heaven, and the blessing of
mankind.

I have stated that so much of the overture made by Congress to the
States, as regards appropriations for colonizing abroad their free
blacks, should be extended to the free, as well as the slave States.
Among the alleged evils of emancipation apprehended at the North, is the
belief that this policy would fill the free States with manumitted
slaves. But, by extending the proposed compacts, so far as regards
colonization, to the free as well as the slave States, this result would
not only be arrested, but the number of free blacks in the North, as
well as the South, would soon be greatly diminished. The brutal assaults
lately made by mobs on unoffending blacks in some of the free States is
truly disgraceful. It is, however, a warning of the fatal consequences
of retaining the free blacks in the North, especially when, from
increasing density of popul