the slaves of their masters, as if the claim
of property were valid? It were better that the money should rust at the
bottom of the deep!--better to buy bank-notes, and convert them to
ashes! To purchase slaves would only serve to make brisk the
slave-market. Their value would immediately rise in all the slave
States; especially in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and North
Carolina, where they are now comparatively worthless--_and there would
be an end to voluntary emancipation_: for who would sacrifice his
'property,' when he might obtain an equivalent for it? Slave traders and
slave owners would be zealous to prevent any lack of miserable objects
for the bounty offered by government: if the natural increase were not
sufficient, they would be careful to make the importation from Africa
exceed the exportation to that ill-fated continent. Such a purchase
would be directly patronising the slave trade, at home and abroad, and
bribing masters to keep their slaves for the highest bidder. Besides, it
would be a gross violation of the great fundamental principle, that 'man
cannot hold property in man.'

I know it is easy to make calculations. I know it is an old maxim, that
'figures cannot lie:' and I very well know, too, that our philanthropic
arithmeticians are prodigiously fond of FIGURING, but of doing nothing
else. Give them a slate and pencil, and in fifteen minutes they will
clear the continent of every black skin; and, if desired, throw in the
Indians to boot. While they depopulate America, they find not the least
difficulty in providing for the wants of the emigrating myriads to the
coast of Africa: we have ships enough, and, notwithstanding the hardness
of the times, money enough. O, the surpassing utility of the arithmetic!
it is more potent than the stone of the philosopher, which, _when
discovered_, is to transmute, at a touch, base metal into pure gold!

In one breath, colonization orators tell us that the free blacks are
pests in the community; that they are an intemperate, ignorant, lazy,
thievish class; that their condition is worse than that of the slaves;
and that no efforts to improve them in this country can be successful,
owing to the prejudices of society. In the next breath we are told what
mighty works these miserable outcasts are to achieve--that they are the
missionaries of salvation,[Z] who are to illumine all Africa--that they
will build up a second American republic--and that our conceptio