Again, you have among you a sneaking individual of the class of native
tyrants known as the _slave-dealer_. He watches your necessities, and
crawls up to buy your slave at a speculating price. If you cannot help
it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your
door. You despise him utterly; you do not recognize him as a friend, or
even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may
rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's
children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through
the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join
hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the
ceremony,--instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows
rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep
up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family. Now, why is this?
You do not so treat the man who deals in cotton, corn, or tobacco.

And yet again. There are in the United States and Territories, including
the District of Columbia, over four hundred and thirty thousand free
blacks. At five hundred dollars per head, they are worth over two
hundred millions of dollars. How comes this vast amount of property to
be running about without owners? We do not see free horses or free
cattle running at large. How is this? All these free blacks are the
descendants of slaves, or have been slaves themselves; and they would be
slaves now but for something that has operated on their white owners,
inducing them at vast pecuniary sacrifice to liberate them. What is that
something? Is there any mistaking it? In all these cases it is your
sense of justice and human sympathy continually telling you that the
poor negro has some natural right to himself,--that those who deny it
and make mere merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt, and death.

And now why will you ask us to deny the humanity of the slave, and