ting for some _benefit_. Before we can affect
to believe that this right was not reserved, in such compact, as
completely as the right to _live_ was reserved, we must affect to
believe, that millions of men, under no control but that of their own
passions and desires, and having all the earth and its products at the
command of their strength and skill, consented to be for ever, they and
their posterity, the _slaves of a few_.

350. We cannot believe this, and therefore, without going back into
_history_ and _precedents_, we must believe, that, in whatever civil
community this right does not exist, it has been lost, or rather,
_unjustly taken away_. And then, having seen the terrible evils which
always have arisen, and always must arise, from the want of it; being
convinced that, where lost or taken away by force or fraud, it is our
very first duty to do all in our power to _restore_ it, the next
consideration is, _how_ one ought to act in the discharge of this most
sacred duty; for sacred it is even as the duties of husband and father.
For, besides the baseness of the thought of quietly submitting to be a
slave _oneself_, we have here, besides our duty to the community, a duty
to perform towards our children and our children's children. We all
acknowledge that it is our bounden duty to provide, as far as our power
will go, for the competence, the health, and the good character of our
children; but, is this duty superior to that of which I am now speaking?
What is competence, what is health, if the possessor be _a slave_, and
hold his possessions at the will of another, or others; as he must do if
destitute of the right to a share in the making of the laws? What is
competence, what is health, if both can, at any moment, be snatched away
by the grasp or the dungeon of a master; and his master he is who makes
the laws without his participation or assent? And, as to _character_, as
to _fair fame_, when the white slave puts forward pretensions to those,
let him no longer affect to commiserate the state of his sleek and fat
brethren in Barbadoes and Jamaica; let him hasten to mix the hair with
the wool, to blend the white with the black, and to lose the memory of
his origin amidst a dingy generation.

351. Such, then, being the nature of the duty, _how_ are we to go to
work in the performance of it, and what are our _means_? With regard to
these, so various are the circumstances, so endless the differences in
the states of s