national disadvantages and losses from
the want of diplomatic relations between the two governments? To what so
much, as to slavery in the slave states, are owing the corruption in our
national councils, and the worst of our legislation? But scarcely any
thing should go farther to inspire the North with a sense of her "just
concern" in the subject of slavery in the slave states, than the fact,
that slavery is the parent of the cruel and murderous prejudice, which
crushes and kills her colored people; and, that it is but too probable,
that the child will live as long as its parent. And has the North no
"just concern" with the slavery of the slave states, when there is so
much reason to fear that our whole blood-guilty nation is threatened
with God's destroying wrath on account of it?

There is another respect in which we of the North have a "just concern"
with the slavery of the slave states. We see nearly three millions of
our fellow men in those states robbed of body, mind, will, and
soul--denied marriage and the reading of the Bible, and marketed as
beasts. We see them in a word crushed in the iron folds of slavery. Our
nature--the laws written upon its very foundations--the Bible, with its
injunctions "to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them," and
to "open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are
appointed to destruction"--all require us to feel and to express what we
feel for these wretched millions. I said, that we see this misery. There
are many amongst us--they are anti-abolitionists--who do not see it; and
to them God says; "but he that hideth his eyes shall have many a curse."

I add, that we of the North must feel concerned about slavery in the
slave states, because of our obligation to pity the deluded,
hard-hearted, and bloody oppressors in those states: and to manifest our
love for them by rebuking their unsurpassed sin. And, notwithstanding
pro-slavery statesmen at the North, who wink at the iniquity of slave
holding, and pro-slavery clergymen at the North, who cry, "peace, peace"
to the slaveholder, and sew "pillows to armholes," tell us, that by our
honest and open rebuke of the slaveholder, we shall incur his enduring
hatred; we, nevertheless, believe that "open rebuke is better than
secret love," and that, in the end, we shall enjoy more Southern favor
than they, whose secret love is too prudent and spurious to deal
faithfully with the objects of its regard. "He that rebuket