sole responsibility of all our foreign relations, was constitutionally
prohibited from interfering in the matter, or from doing any thing but
lifting its hands in prayer to God and these pirates, that the former
would so far depart, and the latter so far desist from their usual
courses, as might be necessary to save us, until 1808, (after which time
we would take the matter into our own hands, and, by prohibiting the
causes of the danger, save ourselves,) from the just vengeance, which
the rest of mankind were taking upon us.

This is the kind of constitution, under which, (according to the slave
argument,) we lived until 1808.

But is such the real character of the constitution? By it, did we thus
really avow to the world that we were a nation of pirates? that our
territory should be a harbor for pirates? that our people were
constitutionally licensed to enslave the people of all other nations,
without discrimination, (for the instrument makes no discrimination,)
whom they could either kidnap in their own countries, or capture on the
high seas? and that we had even prohibited our only government that
could make treaties with foreign nations, from making any treaty, until
1808, with any particular nation, to exempt the people of that nation
from their liability to be enslaved by the people of our own? The slave
argument says that we did avow all this. If we really did, perhaps all
that can be said of it now is, that it is very fortunate for us that
other nations did not take us at our word. For if they had taken us at
our word, we should, before 1808, have been among the nations that were.

Suppose that, on the organization of our government, we had been charged
by foreign nations, with having established a piratical government--how
could we have rebutted the charge otherwise than by denying that the
words "importation of persons" legally implied that the persons imported
were slaves? Suppose that European ambassadors had represented to
president Washington that their governments considered our constitution
as licensing our people to kidnap the people of other nations, without
discrimination, and bring them to the United States as slaves. Would he
not have denied that the legal meaning of the clause did any thing more
than secure the free introduction of foreigners as passengers and
freemen? Or would he--_he_, the world-renowned champion of human
rights--have indeed stooped to the acknowledgment that in truth he was