settlement of the indebtedness. It is too much to expect of sensible
men that they will assent, in a state of sovereign citizenship, to
cancel debts contracted when they had no voice in the matter, and
when, as a matter of fact, the debts were contracted to rivet upon
them the chains of death. And yet for the part the black men of
Virginia took upon the settlement of her infamous debt, they have been
abused and maligned from one end of the country to the other. Because
they refused to vote to tax themselves to pay money borrowed without
their consent, and applied to purposes of death and slaughter, no man
has been found to commend them or to accept as sufficiently
extenuating, the peculiar circumstances surrounding the question.
Shylock must have his pound of flesh, though the unlucky victim bleed
his life away. But there are laws "higher" than any framed in the
interest of tyrannical capital. In my opinion, the man who
deliberately invests his money to perpetuate so vile an institution as
slavery deserves not only to lose the interest upon his investment but
the principal as well. I therefore have not a grain of sympathy for
the greedy cormorants who invested their money in the so-called
Confederate Government. Neither have I any sympathy for the people of
the South who, having invested all their money in human flesh, found
themselves at the close of the Rebellion paupers in more senses than
one--being bankrupt in purse and unused to make an honest living by
honest labor--too proud to work and too poor to loaf.

In a question of this kind, no one disputes the power of Virginia to
contract debts to propagate opinions, erroneous or other, but it is a
question whether the people of one generation have the right to
tax--that is, enslave--the people of generations yet unborn. The
creation of public debts is pernicious in practice, productive of more
harm than good. What right have I to create debts for my grandson or