exible and paramount demands of moral
justice--at eternal variance with the spirit and maxims of revealed
religion--inimical to all that is merciful in the heart, and holy in the
conduct--and on these accounts, necessarily exposed and subject to the
curse of Almighty God. It is, says Rowland Hill, made up of every crime
that treachery, cruelty and murder can invent. Wilberforce says, it is
the full measure of pure, unmixed, unsophisticated wickedness; and
scorning all competition or comparison, it stands without a rival in the
secure, undisputed possession of its detestable pre-eminence. In this
country, slavery is a system which leaves the chastity of one million
females without any protection! which condemns more than two millions of
human beings to remediless bondage! which authorises their sale at
public vendue in company with horses, sheep and hogs, or in a private
manner, at the pleasure of their owners! which, under penalty of
imprisonment, and even death, forbids their being taught the lowest
rudiments of knowledge! which, by the exclusion of their testimony in
courts, subjects them to worse than brutal treatment! which recognizes
no connubial obligations, ruthlessly severs the holiest relations of
life, tears the scarcely weaned babe from the arms of its mother, wives
from their husbands, and parents from their children! But who is
adequate to the task of delineating its horrors, or recording its
atrocities, in full? Who can number the stripes which it inflicts, the
groans and tears and imprecations which it extorts, the cruel murders
which it perpetrates? or who measure the innocent blood which it
spills, or the degradation which it imposes, or the guilt which it
accumulates? or who reveal the waste of property, the perversion of
intellect, the loss of happiness, the burial of mind, to which it is
accessary? or who trace its poisonous influence and soul-destroying
tendency back for two hundred years down to the end of time? None--none
but God himself! It is corrupt as death--black as perdition--cruel and
insatiate as the grave. To adopt the nervous language of another:--The
thing I say is true. I speak the truth, though it is most lamentable. I
dare not hide it, I dare not palliate it; else the horror with which it
covereth me would make me do so. Wo unto such a system! wo unto the men
of this land who have been brought under its operation! It is not felt
to be evil, it is not acknowledged to be evil, it is not