tion had been that all men are born with immortal souls;
for, take away from man his soul, the immortal spirit that is
within him, and he would be a mere tamable beast of the field, and,
like others of his kind, would become the property of his tamer.
Hence it is, too, that, by the law of nature and of God, man can
never be made the property of man. And herein consists the fallacy
with which the holders of slaves often delude themselves, by
assuming that the test of property is human law. The soul of one
man cannot by human law be made the property of another. The owner
of a slave is the owner of a living corpse; but he is not the owner
of a man."

In illustration of this principle he observes that "the natural
equality of mankind, affirmed by the signers of the Declaration of
Independence to be _held up_ by them as self-evident truth, was not so
held by their enemies. Great Britain held that sovereign power was
unlimitable, and the natural equality of mankind was a fable. France
and Spain had no sympathies for the rights of human nature. Vergennes
plotted with Gustavus of Sweden the revolution in Sweden from liberty
to despotism. Turgot, shortly after our Declaration of Independence,
advised Louis Sixteenth that it was for _the interest_ of France and
Spain that the insurrection of the Anglo-American colonies _should be
suppressed_. But none of them foresaw or imagined what would be the
consequence of the triumphant establishment in the continent of North
America of an Anglo-Saxon American nation on the foundation of the
natural equality of mankind, and the inalienable rights of man."

Mr. Adams then states and reasons upon these consequences in Europe and
the United States: the abolition of slavery by the judicial decision of
the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, three years after the Declaration of
Independence. Since that day there has not been a slave within that
state. The same principle is corroborated by the fact that the
Declaration of Independence imputes slavery in Virginia to George the
Third, as one of the crimes which proved him to be a tyrant, unfit to
rule a free people; and that at least twenty slaveholders, if not
thirty, among whom were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, avowed
abolitionists, were signers of that Declaration.

He next states that "the result of the North American revolutionary war
had prepared the minds of the people of the British nation t