And further, cannot _consistency_ utter a plea? There is nothing, perhaps, at which men labour more earnestly than to appear consistent. But what fellowship can there be between liberty and slavery? Slavery is a foul blot on the escutcheon of the United States; and every patriotic American feels it to be so. Here, in the land of liberty, Freedom receives her deepest wound in the house of her vaunting friends. The enemies of tyranny over the world are taunted with the despotism of the American democrat. The infidel of our day draws his most potent arguments from the vices and faults of professing Christians; and the advocates of despotism act in the same manner, and procure their artillery from the barbarism of American slave-holders. We must then assail this inconsistency until the guilty parties blush and are ashamed. The continual dropping of water will wear away stones, and the persevering reiterations of truth shall eventually prevail, and make even slave-holders relent and listen to the voice of consistency and humanity.
We have had among us glorious specimens of what the slave can be. To those who talk of his inferior powers and limited rights, we point to such men as Frederick Douglass, Wells Brown, Henson, Garnett, and Dr. Pennington. It was our privilege to enter the hall at Heidelberg, just as the academy conferred on Dr. Pennington his diploma. And is this the man that the slave-holder would sell as he would a horse or bullock? What is the reply of humanity to this question? I need not dwell on the mind, talents, and piety of Brown, Henson, or Garnett. The country has long since borne witness to these. Exeter-hall has often resounded with the loftiest strains of eloquence, but never has it listened to a more intellectual, eloquent, and soul-stirring tongue, than that of Frederick Douglass, and yet this is the man, on whose head the planters have set a price, because he obeyed the voice of nature and of God in running away from the horrors of slavery. But why advance these examples? There is not a field of slaves, a slave-market, or a negro cabin, but proclaims the equality of the African with the rest of the human family. The tears, cries, and broken hearts which every separation by the dealer occasions, proclaim that the sympathies of the slave are equal to those of the rest of mankind. Every argument used by these sons and daughters of bondage, every prayer they offer, every speech they make, and every sermon they preach, prove that all the essentials of soul belong to them in as much native richness as to us. ’Tis true everything has been done to degrade them. The cruelties practised by Simon the cobbler to deprave and demoralise the Dauphin of France, and which awakened the execration of the world, are every day being followed by the planters of America. What if any of us had had the sphere of our knowledge contracted to the smallest span, and our language confined to a few words of the most outlandish _patois_, is there one man among us that would surpass them in their present condition? Where would Milton, Shakspeare, or Newton have been under such training? Considering the debasing education to which they have been doomed, the slaves are our equals, if not our superiors; every part of their history shows the truth of the words of our poet—