Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 by Harriet Beecher Stowe
page 44 of 409 (10%)
page 44 of 409 (10%)
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Though long ago imbued, with antislavery principles and interested in
the progress of liberty in every part of the world, our community, like many others, required such information, suggestions, and appeals as your valuable work contains in one great department of slavery, in order that their interest might be turned into a specific direction, and their principles reduced, to combined practical effort. Already they have esteemed it a privilege to engage with some activity in the promotion of the interests of the fugitive slave; and they shall henceforth regard with a deeper interest than ever the movements of their American brethren in this matter, until there exists among them no slavery from which to flee. While they participate in your abhorrence of slavery in the American states, they trust they need scarcely assure you that they participate also in your love for the American people. It is in proportion as they love that nation, attached to them by so many ties, that they lament the existence of a system which, so long as it exists, must bring odium upon the national character, as it cannot fail to enfeeble and impair their best social institutions. They believe it to be a maxim that man cannot hold his fellow-man in slavery without being himself to some extent enslaved. And of this the censorship of the press, together with the expurgatorial indices of various religious societies in the Southern States of America, furnish ample corroboration. It is hoped that your own nation may speedily be directed to recognize you as its best friend, for having stood forth in the spirit of true |
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