soon pass away--let it come and rage its little hour, since it
is to be succeeded by lasting freedom, and prosperity and
happiness. Give me the hurricane rather than the pestilence.
Give me the hurricane, with its thunder, and its lightning, and
its tempest;--give me the hurricane, with its partial and
temporary devastations, awful though they be;--give me the
hurricane, with its purifying, healthful, salutary
effects;--give me that hurricane, infinitely rather than the
noisome pestilence, whose path is never crossed, whose silence
is never disturbed, whose progress is never arrested, by one
sweeping blast from the heavens; which walks peacefully and
sullenly through the length and breadth of the land, breathing
poison into every heart, and carrying havoc into every home,
enervating all that is strong, defacing all that is beautiful,
and casting its blight over the fairest and happiest scenes of
human life--and which, from day to day, and from year to year,
with intolerant and interminable malignity, sends its thousands
and its tens of thousands of hapless victims into the
ever-yawning and never-satisfied grave!'

It is said, by way of extenuation, that the present owners of slaves are
not responsible for the origin of this system. I do not arraign them for
the crimes _of their ancestors_, but for the constant perpetration and
extension of similar crimes. The plea that the evil of slavery was
entailed upon them, shall avail them nothing: in its length and breadth
it means that the robberies of one generation justify the robberies of
another! that the inheritance of stolen property converts it into an
honest acquisition! that the atrocious conduct of their fathers
exonerates them from all accountability, thus presenting the strange
anomaly of a race of men incapable of incurring guilt, though daily
practising the vilest deeds! Scarcely any one denies that blame attaches
somewhere: the present generation throws it upon the past--the past,
upon its predecessor--and thus it is cast, like a ball, from one to
another, down to the first importers of the Africans! 'Can that be
_innocence_ in the temperate zone, which is the _acme of all guilt_ near
the equator? Can that be _honesty_ in one meridian of longitude, which,
at one hundred degrees east, is the _climax of injustice_?' Sixty
thousand infants, the offspring of slave-parents, are annually born in