e
consistent with himself--with the doctrine in question--he must reply in
the negative. To be consistent with himself, he must advise the people
of the northern states to let their own gambling-houses and brothels
stand, until they can make the object of their abolishment "ultimate
within itself;"--until they can expel from their hearts the cherished
hope, that the purification of their own states of these haunts of
wickedness would exert an influence to induce the people of their sister
states to enter upon a similar work of purity and righteousness. But I
trust, that President Wayland would not desire to be consistent with
himself on this point. I trust that he would have the magnanimity to
throw away this perhaps most pernicious doctrine of a pernicious book,
which every reader of it must see was written to flatter and please the
slaveholder and arrest the progress of the anti-slavery cause. How great
the sin of seizing on this very time, when special efforts are being
made to enlist the world's sympathies in behalf of the millions of our
robbed, outraged, crushed countrymen--how great the sin, of seizing on
such a time to attempt to neutralize those efforts, by ascribing to the
oppressors of these millions a characteristic "nobleness"--"enthusiastic
attachment to personal right"--"disinterestedness which has always
marked the southern character"--and a superiority to all others "in
making any sacrifice for the public good!" It is this sin--this heinous
sin--of which President Wayland has to repent. If he pities the slave,
it is because he knows, that the qualities, which he ascribes to the
slaveholder, do not, in fact, belong to him. On the other hand, if he
believes the slaveholder to be, what he represents him to be, he does
not--in the very nature of things, he cannot--pity the slave. He must
rather rejoice, that the slave has fallen into the hands of one, who,
though he has the name, cannot have the heart, and cannot continue in
the relation of a slaveholder. If John Hook, for having mingled his
discordant and selfish cries with the acclamations of victory and then
general joy, deserved Patrick Henry's memorable rebuke, what does he not
deserve, who finds it in his heart to arrest the swelling tide of pity
for the oppressed by praises of the oppressor, and to drown the public
lament over the slave's subjection to absolute power, in the
congratulation, that the slaveholder who exercises that power, is a
being of