e reading, writing, and
cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among
us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and
teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common
to other men--digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the
Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving,
acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and
children, and, above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian's God,
and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave--we are
called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the
rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must
I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for
republicans?{352} Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and
argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a
doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood?
How should I look to-day in the presence of Americans, dividing and
subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to
freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and
affirmatively? To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to
offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the
canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for _him_.

What! am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them
of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of
their relations to their fellow-men, to beat them with sticks, to flay
their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them
with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock
out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and
submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system, thus marked
with blood and stained with pollution, is wrong? No; I will not. I have
better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would
imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that
God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken?
There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman cannot be
divine. Who can reason on such a proposition! They that can, may! I
cannot. The time for such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing