ny more than he,
who steals horses, entitled to "compensation" for releasing his plunder.
They do not know, why he, who has exacted thirty years' unrequited toil
from the sinews of his poor oppressed brother, should be paid for
letting that poor oppressed brother labor for himself the remaining ten
or twenty years of his life. But, it is said, that the South bought her
slaves of the North, and that we of the North ought therefore to
compensate the South for liberating them. If there are individuals at
the North, who have sold slaves, I am free to admit, that they should
promptly surrender their ill-gotten gains; and no less promptly should
the inheritors of such gains surrender them. But, however this may be,
and whatever debt may be due on this score, from the North to the South,
certain it is, that on no principle of sound ethics, can the South hold
to the persons of the innocent slaves, as security for the payment of
the debt. Your state and mine, and I would it were so with all others,
no longer allow the imprisonment of the debtor as a means of coercing
payment from him. How much less, then, should they allow the creditor to
promote the security of his debt by imprisoning a third person--and one
who is wholly innocent of contracting the debt? But who is imprisoned,
if it be not he, who is shut up in "the house of bondage?" And who is
more entirely innocent than he, of the guilty transactions between his
seller and buyer?

Another of your charges against abolitionists is, _that, although
"utterly destitute of Constitutional or other rightful power--living in
totally distinct communities--as alien to the communities in which the
subject on which they would operate resides, so far as concerns
political power over that subject, as if they lived in Africa or Asia;
they nevertheless promulgate to the world their purpose to be, to
manumit forthwith, and without compensation, and without moral
preparation, three millions of negro slaves, under jurisdictions
altogether separated from those under which they live."_

I will group with this charge several others of the same class.

_1._ _Abolitionists neglect the fact, that "the slavery which exists
amongst us (southern people) is our affair--not theirs--and that they
have no more just concern with it, than they have with slavery as it
exists throughout the world."_

_2._ _They are regardless of the "deficiency of the powers of the
General Government, and of the acknowledg