bserviency to the foulest purposes. Nay, the
very power they have usurped, has often been the chief instrument of
turning their heads, inflaming their passions, corrupting their hearts.
All the world knows, that the possession of arbitrary power has a strong
tendency to make men shamelessly wicked and insufferably mischievous.
And this, whether the vassals over whom they domineer, be few or many.
If you can not trust man with himself, will you put his fellows under
his control?--and flee from the inconveniences incident to
self-government, to the horrors of despotism?

"THOU THAT PREACHEST A MAN SHOULD NOT STEAL, DOST THOU STEAL."

Is the slaveholder, the most absolute and shameless of all despots, to
be intrusted with the discipline of the injured men whom he himself has
reduced to cattle?--with the discipline by which they are to be prepared
to wield the powers and enjoy the privileges of freemen? Alas, of such
discipline as he can furnish, in the relation of owner to property, they
have had enough. From this sprang the vary ignorance and vice, which in
the view of many lie in the way of their immediate enfranchisement. He
it is, who has darkened their eyes and crippled their powers. And are
they to look to him for illumination and renewed vigor!--and expect
"grapes from thorns and figs from thistles!" Heaven forbid! When,
according to arrangements which had usurped the sacred name of law, he
consented to receive and use them as property, he forfeited all claims
to the esteem and confidence, not only of the helpless sufferers
themselves, but also of every philanthropist. In becoming a slaveholder,
he became the enemy of mankind. The very act was a declaration of war
upon human man nature. What less can be made of the process of turning
men to cattle? It is rank absurdity--it is the height of madness, to
propose to employ _him_ to train, for the places of freemen, those whom
he has wantonly robbed of every right--whom he has stolen from
themselves. Sooner place Burke, who used to murder for the sake of
selling bodies to the dissector, at the head of a hospital. Why, what
have our slaveholders been about these two hundred years? Have they not
been constantly and earnestly engaged in the work of education?
--training up their human cattle? And how? Thomas Jefferson shall
answer. "The whole commerce between master and slave, is a perpetual
exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism
on the on