another all unutterable woes; such as it is at this day: it is the
law written by the finger of God upon the heart of man; and by that
law, unchangeable and eternal while men despise fraud, and loathe
rapine, and abhor blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild
and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man."
--LORD BROUGHAM.

IT may be inquired of me why I seek to agitate the subject of Slavery in
New England, where we all acknowledge it to be an evil. Because such an
acknowledgment is not enough on our part. It is doing no more than the
slave-master and the slave-trader. "We have found," says James Monroe,
in his speech on the subject before the Virginia Convention, "that this
evil has preyed upon the very vitals of the Union; and has been
prejudicial to all the states in which it has existed." All the states
in their several Constitutions and declarations of rights have made a
similar statement. And what has been the consequence of this general
belief in the evil of human servitude? Has it sapped the foundations of
the infamous system? No. Has it decreased the number of its victims?
Quite the contrary. Unaccompanied by philanthropic action, it has been
in a moral point of view worthless, a thing without vitality, sightless,
soulless, dead.

But it may be said that the miserable victims of the system have our
sympathies. Sympathy the sympathy of the Priest and the Levite, looking
on, and acknowledging, but holding itself aloof from mortal suffering.
Can such hollow sympathy reach the broken of heart, and does the blessing
of those who are ready to perish answer it? Does it hold back the lash
from the slave, or sweeten his bitter bread? One's heart and soul are
becoming weary of this sympathy, this heartless mockery of feeling; sick
of the common cant of hypocrisy, wreathing the artificial flowers of