also,
that this twelve hundred millions of dollars of property is
peculiar in its character, and comes under a classification once
denominated by a Governor of Virginia _property acquired by crime_;
that it sits uneasy upon the conscience of its owner; that, in the
purification of human virtue, and the progress of the Christian
religion, it has become, and is daily becoming, more and more
odious; that Washington and Jefferson, themselves slaveholders,
living and dying, bore testimony against it; that it was the dying
REMORSE of John Randolph; that it is renounced and abjured by the
supreme pontiff of the Roman Church, abolished with execration by
the Mahometan despot of Tunis, shaken to its foundations by the
imperial autocrat of all the Russias and the absolute monarch of
Austria;--all, all bearing reluctant and extorted testimony to the
self-evident truth that, by the laws of nature and nature's God,
man cannot be the property of man. Recollect that the first cry of
human feeling against this unhallowed outrage upon human rights
came from ourselves--from the Quakers of Pennsylvania; that it
passed from us to England, from England to France, and spread over
the civilized world; that, after struggling for nearly a century
against the most sordid interests and most furious passions of man,
it made its way at length into the Parliament, and ascended the
throne, of the British Isles. The slave-trade was made piracy first
by the Congress of the United States, and then by the Parliament of
Great Britain.

"But the curse fastened by the progress of Christian charity and of
human rights upon the African slave-trade could not rest there. If
the African slave-trade was piracy, the coasting American
slave-trade could not be innocent, nor could its aggravated
turpitude be denied. In the sight of the same God who abhors the
iniquity of the African slave-trade, neither the American
slave-trade nor slavery itself can be held guiltless. From the
suppression of the African slave-trade, therefore, the British
Parliament, impelled by the irresistible influence of the British
people, proceeded to point the battery of its power against slavery
itself. At the expense of one hundred millions of dollars, it
abolished slavery, and emancipated all the slaves in the British
transatlantic colonies; a