Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/429

 it becomes necessary to preach atheism, we may be certain that the day of its downfall is nigh. This must surely be the darkness which precedes the cot for what greater darkness than this is possible!

To you, then, uncontaminated children, I appeal; and in mine speak the cries of millions. That which hath been hidden from the wise and the prudent, the voice of love and mercy shall reveal unto you.

Love and mercy, did I say? There hardly needs that; a decent self-respect, a regard for yourselves only, might suffice.

The whip flourishes also over your heads. The white slaves in America are far more numerous than the black ones; not white slaves such as I was, pronounced so by the law, but white slaves such as you are, made such by a base hereditary servility, which, methinks, it is time to shake off.

The question is raised, and can be blinked no longer: Shall America be what the fathers and founders of her independence wished and hoped — a free democracy, based upon the foundation of human rights, or shall she degenerate into a miserable republic of Algerines, domineered over by a little selfconstituted autocracy of slaveholding lynchers and blackguards, utterly disregardful of all law, except their own will and pleasure?

Yes, my young friends, it is to this destiny that you are called. Upon you the decision of this question — no longer to be staved off by any political temporizing — is devolved. Those who would be free themselves — so it now plainly appears — cannot safely be parties to any scheme of oppression. The dead and the living cannot be chained together. Those chains which you have helped to rivet on the limbs of others, you now find, have imperceptibly been twined about yourselves; and drawn so tightly, too, that even your hearts are no longer to beat freely.

Take courage, then, and do as I did. Throw off