such an exercise of
legislative wisdom could not overcome certain arithmetical prejudices
innate in our minds, or dethrone the stubborn eight from its accustomed
position in our thoughts. But you might as well ordain that four and
four make ten as ordain that a man has no right to himself, but can
properly be held as the chattel of another. Yet this arrogant falsehood
of property in men has been organized into a colossal institution. The
South calls it a "peculiar" institution; and herein perhaps consists
its peculiarity, that it is an absurdity which has lied itself into a
substantial form, and now argues its right to exist from the fact of its
existence. Doubtless, the fact that a thing exists proves that it has
its roots in human nature; but before we accept this as decisive of
its right to exist, it may be well to explore those qualities in human
nature, "peculiar" and perverse as itself, from which it derives
its poisonous vitality and strength. It is plain, we think, that an
institution embodying an essential falsity, which equally affronts the
common sense and the moral sense of mankind, and which, as respects
chronology, was as repugnant to the instincts of Homer as it is to the
instincts of Whittier, must have sprung from the unblessed union of
wilfulness and avarice, of avarice which knows no conscience, and of
wilfulness that tramples on reason; and the marks of this parentage,
the signs of these its boasted roots in human nature, are, we are
constrained to concede, visible in every stage of its growth, in every
argument for its existence, in every motive for its extension.

It is not, perhaps, surprising that some of the advocates of Slavery do
not relish the analysis which reveals the origin of their institution
in those dispositions which connect man with the tiger and the wolf.
Accordingly they discourage, with true democratic humility, all
genealogical inquiries into the ancestry of their system, substitute
generalization for analysis, and, twisting the maxims of religion into
a philosophy of servitude, bear down all arguments with the sounding
proposition, that Slavery is included in the plan of God's providence,
and therefore cannot be wrong. Certain thinkers of our day have asserted
the universality of the religious element in human nature: and it must
be admitted that men become very pious when their minds are illuminated
by the discernment of a Providential sanction for their darling sins,
and by th