Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/391

, and what is of more importance, our sentiments and our opinions, have their due weight in the government we live under. Our laws are altogether our own; they grow out of our circumstances, are framed for our exclusive benefit, and administered by officers of our own appointment, and as such possess our confidence. We have a judiciary chosen from among ourselves; we serve as jurors in the trials of others, and are liable to be tried only by juries of our fellow-citizens ourselves. We have all that is meant by liberty of conscience. The time and mode of worshiping God, as prescribed to us in His word, and dictated by our conscience, we arc not only free to follow, but are protected in following.

"Forming a community of our own in the land of our forefathers; having the commerce, and the soil, and the resources of the country at our disposal, we know nothing of that debasing inferiority with which our very color stamped us in America. There is nothing here to create the feeling of caste — nothing to cherish the feeling of superiority in the minds of foreigners who visit us. It is this moral emancipation, this liberty of the mind from worse than iron fetters, that repays us ten thousand times over for all that it has cost us, and makes us grateful to God and our American patrons for the happy change which has taken place in our situation. We are not so self-complacent as to rest satisfied with our improvement, either as regards our minds or our circumstances. We do not expect to remain stationary — far from it But we certainly feel ourselves, for the first time, in a state to enjoy either to any purpose. The burden is gone from our shoulders. We now breathe and move freely, and know not (in surveying your present state) for which to pity you most, the empty name of liberty which you endeavor to content yourselves with, in a country that is not yours, or the delusion which makes you hope for ampler privileges in that country hereafter.

"We solicit none of you to emigrate to this country; for we know not who among you prefers rational independence, and the honest respect of his fellow-men, to that mental sloth and careless poverty which you already possess, and your children will inherit after you in America. But if your views and aspirations rise a degree higher — if your minds are not as servile as your present condition, we can decide the question at once; and with confidence say that you will bless the day, and your children after you, when you determined to become citizens of Liberia.

"But we do not hold this language on the blessings of liberty for the purpose of consoling ourselves for the sacrifice of health, or the sufferings of want, in consequence of our removal to Africa. We enjoy health, after a few months' residence in this country; and a distressing scarcity of provisions, or any of the necessaries of life, has of late been entirely unknown, even to the poorest persons in this community. On these points there are, and have been, much misconception and some malicious misrepresentations in the United States.

"The true character of the African climate is not well understood in other countries. Its inhabitants are as robust, as healthy, as long-lived, to say the least, as those of any other country. Nothing like an epidemic has ever