ly admitted by many slave holders. To continue to call
the attention of the people to these effects, will undoubtedly be
useful in the furtherance of the grand object of our aim.

The passage of laws by our state legislatures, fixing a certain period
after which all shall be born free, or shall be free at a certain age,
is a proposed measure which has formerly received the sanction of this
Convention. It is analagous to those which have already been adopted
in some of our states, and it is that by which the final extinction of
slavery will probably be effected throughout our country. But it seems
unlikely that those states where slaves are very numerous, will
consent to the measure, until the proportion of slaves has been
considerably reduced by other means. It can hardly be expected that
the whites, where they are a minority, will, at any near period of
time, consent to surrender political power into the hands of a race
which they are accustomed to look upon as inferior and degraded, or
that they will be free from apprehension of a contest for property as
the probable result. History furnishes no instance of the passage of a
law for abolishing slavery in a nation where the slaves at the time
of its passage were nearly equal in number to the freemen. We have no
evidence to justify the assumption, that mankind in future will act
differently. The condition of some of our states, never-the-less, is
such, that measures of this kind may with great propriety be urged,
and kept constantly in view of the public.

Appeals to a sense of justice, and the dictates of religion, operating
on individuals to produce voluntary emancipation, have been the chief
means by which slavery has been abolished or greatly reduced, in most
countries where it once extensively existed. Such were the means of
the liberation of serfs in Great Britain and other European
countries.[15] They are those which have produced the emancipation of
most of the free coloured people now existing in the United States.
They are those which must be looked to, for so far diminishing the
evil, as to produce that state of society in which the passage of laws
for complete abolition may be obtained. But unfortunately a sense of
danger, mingled with other motives or interest, has produced the
enactment of laws in most of the slave holding states, prohibiting or
greatly limiting the exercise of benevolent feelings in this way. The
repeal of these laws must be the first or