Page:An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.djvu/42

28 the evils it engrafts upon the character. If they lived on our rocky soil, and under our inclement skies, their shrewdness would sometimes border upon knavery, and their frugality sometimes degenerate into parsimony. We both have our virtues, and our faults, induced by the influences under which we live, and, of course, totally different in their character. Our defects are bad enough; but they cannot, like slavery, affect the destiny and rights of millions.

All this mutual recrimination about horse-jockeys, gamblers, tin-pedlers, and venders of wooden nutmegs, is quite unworthy of a great nation. Instead of calmly examining this important subject on the plain grounds of justice and humanity, we allow it to degenerate into a mere question of sectional pride and vanity. [Pardon the Americanism, would we had less use for the word!] It is the system, not the men, on which we ought to bestow the full measure of abhorrence. If we were willing to forget ourselves, and could, like true republicans, prefer the common good to all other considerations, there would not be a slave in the United States, at the end of half a century.

The arguments in support of slavery are all hollow and deceptive, though frequently very specious. No one thinks of finding a foundation for the system in the principles of truth and justice; and the unavoidable result is, that even in policy it is unsound. The monstrous fabric rests on the mere appearance of present expediency; while, in fact, all its tendencies, individual and national, present and remote, are highly injurious to the true interests of the country. The slave owner will not believe this. The stronger the evidence against his favorite theories, the more strenuously he defends them. It has been wisely said, "Honesty is the best policy; but policy without honesty never finds that out."

I hope none will be so literal as to suppose I intend to say that no planter can be honest, in the common acceptation of that term. I simply mean that all who ground their arguments in policy, and not in duty and plain truth, are really blind to the highest and best interests of man.