t would
be heard. The national conscience was awakened to inquiry, and inquiry
soon produced conviction." Sir George justly calls the doctrine novel.
As developed in the controversy, it laid down the general proposition,
that _men and women are not, and cannot be chattels_; and that all
human enactments which decree this are _morally null and void_, as
sinning against the higher law of nature and of God. And the reason
of this lies in the essential contrast of a moral personality and
chattel. Criminals may deserve to be bound and scourged, but they do
not cease to be persons, nor indeed do even the insane. Since every
man is a person, he cannot be a piece of property, nor has an
"owner" any just and moral claim to his services. Usage, so far from
conferring this claim, increases the total amount of injustice; the
longer an innocent man is _forcibly_ kept in slavery, the greater the
reparation to which he is entitled for the oppressive immorality. This
doctrine I now believe to be irrefutable truth, but I disbelieved it
while I thought the Scripture authoritative; because I found a very
different doctrine there--a doctrine which is the argumentative
stronghold of the American slaveholder. Paul sent back the fugitive
Onesimus to his master Philemon, with kind recommendations and
apologies for the slave, and a tender charge to Philemon, that he
would receive Onesimus as a brother in the Lord, since he had been
converted by Paul in the interval; but this very recommendation,
full of affection as it is, virtually recognizes the moral rights of
Philemon to the services of his slave; and hinting that if Onesimus
stole anything, Philemon should now forgive him, Paul shows perfect
insensibility to the fact that the master who detains a slave in
captivity against his will, is guilty himself of a continual theft.
What says Mrs. Beecher Stowe's Cassy to this? "Stealing!--They who
steal body and soul need not talk to us. Every one of these bills is
stolen--stolen from poor starving, sweating creatures." Now Onesimus,
in the very act of taking to flight, showed that he had been
submitting to servitude against his will, and that the house of his
owner had previously been a prison to him. To suppose that Philemon
has a pecuniary interest in the return of Onesimus to work without
wages, implies that the master habitually steals the slave's earnings;
but if he loses nothing by the flight, he has not been wronged by it.
Such is the modern