a _man_ was stolen,
no property compensation was offered. To tender money as an equivalent,
would have been to repeat the outrage with intolerable aggravations.
Compute the value of a MAN in _money!_ Throw dust into the scale against
immortality! The law recoiled from such supreme insult and impiety. To
have permitted the man-thief to expiate his crime by restoring double,
would have been making the repetition of crime its atonement. But the
infliction of death for _man-stealing_ exacted the utmost possibility of
reparation. It wrung from the guilty wretch as he gave up the ghost, a
testimony in blood, and death-groans, to the infinite dignity and worth
of man,--a proclamation to the universe, voiced in mortal agony, "MAN IS
INVIOLABLE"--a confession shrieked in phrenzy at the grave's mouth--"I
die accursed, and God is just."

If God permitted man to hold man as property, why did he punish for
stealing that kind of property infinitely more than for stealing any
other kind of property? Why did he punish with death for stealing a very
little of _that_ sort of property, and make a mere fine, the penalty for
stealing a thousand times as much, of any other sort of
property--especially if God did by his own act annihilate the difference
between man and _property,_ by putting him on a level with it?

The atrociousness of a crime, depends much upon the nature, character,
and condition of the victim. To steal is a crime, whoever the thief, or
whatever the plunder. To steal bread from a full man, is theft; to steal
from a starving man, is both theft and murder. If I steal my neighbor's
property, the crime consists not in altering the _nature_ of the article
but in shifting its relation from him to me. But when I take my neighbor
himself, and first make him _property_, and then _my_ property, the
latter act, which was the sole crime in the former case, dwindles to
nothing. The sin in stealing a man, is not the transfer from its owner
to another of that which is _already property,_ but the turning of
_personality_ into _property_. True, the attributes of man remain, but
the rights and immunities which grow out of them are attributed. It is
the first law both of reason and revelation to regard things and beings
as they are; and the sum of religion, to feel and act towards them
according to their value. Knowingly to treat them otherwise is sin; and
the degree of violence done to their nature, religions, and value,
measures its guilt