Page:The Barbarism of Slavery.djvu/74

 in that being, just as the very idea of a thing necessarily excludes the idea of a human being. It is clear that a thing can not be a human being, and it is equally clear that a human being can not be a thing. And the law itself, when it adopts the phrase, "relation of master and slave," confesses its reluctance to sanction the claim of property. It shrinks from the pretension of Senators, and satisfies itself with a formula, which does not openly degrade human nature.

If this property does exist, out of what title is it derived? Under what ordinance of Nature or of Nature's God is one human being stamped an owner and another stamped a thing? God is no respecter of persons. Where is the sanction for this respect of certain persons to a degree which becomes outrage to other persons? God is the Father of the Human Family, and we are all his children. Where then is the sanction of this pretension by which a brother lays violent hands upon a brother? To ask these questions is humiliating; but it is clear there can be but one response. There is no sanction for such pretension; no ordinance for it, or title. On all grounds of reason, and waiving all questions of "positive" statute, the Vermont Judge was nobly right, when, rejecting the claim of a Slave-master, he said: "No; not until you show a Bill of Sale from the Almighty." Nothing short of this impossible link in the chain of title would do. I know something of the great judgments by which the jurisprudence of our country has been illustrated; but I doubt if there is any thing in the wisdom of Marshall, the learning of Story, or the completeness of Kent, which will brighten with time like this honest decree.

The intrinsic feebleness of this pretension is apparent in the intrinsic feebleness of the arguments by which it is maintained. These are two-fold, and both have been put forth im recent debate by the Senator from Mississippi, [.]

The first is the alleged inferiority of the African race; an argument which, while surrendering to Slavery a whole race, leaves it uncertain whether the same principle may not be applied to other races, as to the polished Japanese, who are now the guests of the nation, and even to persons of obvious inferiority in the white race. Indeed, the latter pretension is openly made in other quarters. The Richmond Enquirer, a leading journal of Slave-masters, declares: "The principle of Slavery is