The Southern States, according to their own evidence, are impoverished by it; a great amount of wretchedness and crime inevitably follows in its train; the prosperity of the North is continually checked by it; it promotes feelings of rivalry between the States; it separates our interests; makes our councils discordant; threatens the destruction of our government; and disgraces us in the eyes of the world. I have often heard Americans who have been abroad, declare that nothing embarrassed them so much as being questioned about our slaves; and that nothing was so mortifying as to have the pictures of runaway negroes pointed at in the newspapers of this republic. La Fayette, with all his admiration for our institutions, can never speak of the subject without regret and shame.
Now a common evil certainly implies a common right to remedy; and where is the remedy to be found, if the South in all their speeches and writings repeat that slavery _must_ exist--if the Colonization Society re-echo, in all their Addresses and Reports, that there is no help for the evil, and it is very wicked to hint that there is--and if public opinion here brands every body as a fanatic and madman, who wishes to _inquire_ what can be done? The supineness of New-England on this subject, reminds me of the man who being asked to work at the pump, because the vessel was going down, answered, "I am only a passenger."
An error often and urgently repeated is apt to receive the sanction of truth; and so it is in this case. The public take it for granted that slavery is a "lamentable _necessity_." Nevertheless there _is_ a way to effect its cure, if we all join sincerely, earnestly, and kindly in the work; but if we expend our energies in palliating the evil, or mourning over its hopelessness, or quarrelling about who is the most to blame for it, the vessel,--crew, passengers, and all,--will go down together.
I object to the Colonization Society, because it tends to put public opinion asleep, on a subject where it needs to be wide awake.
The address above alluded to, does indeed inform us of one thing which we are at liberty to do: "We must _go_ to the master and _adjure_ him, by all the sacred rights of humanity, by all the laws of natural justice, by his dread responsibilities,--which, in the economy of Providence, are always co-extensive and commensurate with power,--to _raise the slave_ out of his abyss of degradation, to give him a participation in the benefits of mortal existence, and to make him a member of the _intellectual_ and moral world, from which he, and his fathers, for so many generations, have been exiled." The practical _utility_ of such a plan needs no comment. Slave-owners will smile when they read it.