lands of the earth; from her the
human race drew hope.

Neither hereditary monarchy nor hereditary aristocracy planted itself
on our soil; the only hereditary condition that fastened itself upon
us was servitude. Nature works in sincerity, and is ever true to its
law. The bee hives honey; the viper distils poison; the vine stores
its juices, and so do the poppy and the upas. In like manner every
thought and every action ripens its seed, each according to its kind.
In the individual man, and still more in a nation, a just idea gives
life, and progress, and glory; a false conception portends disaster,
shame, and death. A hundred and twenty years ago a West Jersey Quaker
wrote: "This trade of importing slaves is dark gloominess hanging over
the land; the consequences will be grievous to posterity." At the
North the growth of slavery was arrested by natural causes; in the
region nearest the tropics it throve rankly, and worked itself into
the organism of the rising States. Virginia stood between the two,
with soil, and climate, and resources demanding free labor, yet
capable of the profitable employment of the slave. She was the land of
great statesmen, and they saw the danger of her being whelmed under
the rising flood in time to struggle against the delusions of avarice
and pride. Ninety-four years ago the legislature of Virginia addressed
the British king, saying that the trade in slaves was "of great
inhumanity," was opposed to the "security and happiness" of their
constituents, "would in time have the most destructive influence," and
"endanger their very existence." And the king answered them that,
"upon pain of his highest displeasure, the importation of slaves
should not be in any respect obstructed." "Pharisaical Britain," wrote
Franklin in behalf of Virginia, "to pride thyself in setting free a
single slave that happened to land on thy coasts, while thy laws
continue a traffic whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged
into a slavery that is entailed on their posterity." "A serious view
of this subject," said Patrick Henry in 1773, "gives a gloomy prospect
to future times." In the same year George Mason wrote to the
legislature of Virginia: "The laws of impartial Providence may avenge
our injustice upon our posterity." Conforming his conduct to his
convictions, Jefferson, in Virginia and in the Continental Congress,
with the approval of Edmund Pendleton, branded the slave-trade as
piracy; and he fixed in th