"How horrible must be that system which demands as the necessary condition of its existence, that knowledge should be shut out from the minds of those who live under it--that they should be reduced as nearly as possible to the level of brutes, or living machines--that the powers of their souls should be crushed! Let each one of us ask, Can such a system be aided, or even tolerated, without deep criminality?" (Ad. to the Pres. of Ken. by a committee of the synod of Kentucky.)
But even if slavery could be divested of all its horrible accompaniments, its ignorance, licentiousness, and other nameless abominations, we should still regard the circumstance of man holding his brother man as property as one of the blackest crimes which corrupt human nature ever invented. Mr. Moore, in the speech from which we have already quoted, is compelled to acknowledge the iniquity of this system. "It cannot be denied," he says, "as a general principle, that it is an act of tyranny, injustice, and oppression, to hold any part of the human race in bondage against their consent.... The right to the enjoyment of liberty is one of those perfect, inherent, and inalienable rights which pertain to the whole human race, and of which they can never be divested, except by an act of gross injustice." If we would rightly estimate the wretchedness in which the perpetration of this "act of gross injustice" has involved one sixth part of the population of Republican America, we must compare the condition of our slaves with that of the freemen of their own age and country. "Things are estimated by comparison; and the man who is deprived of every natural, civil, and social right, while all around him are basking in the sunshine of freedom, must feel the fangs of slavery much more poignantly than the one who, though subjected to similar privations, beholds his lot but little below that of those who surround him." We must not, therefore, compare the situation of slaves in the United States with that of the slaves of heathen Greece and Rome, where equal laws never existed, and where the beams of liberty and Christianity never shone; but to form a correct judgment of the miseries endured by our slaves, we must compare them with the laboring class of our population in the free states, and we may then comprehend the debasing influence of a system which produces such dreadful results as are exhibited on almost every Southern plantation, where the lash is the principal, if not the only stimulus.