It has called
into exercise among the colored people, the hunted ones, a spirit
of manly resistance well calculated to surround them with a
bulwark of sympathy and respect hitherto unknown. For men are
always disposed to respect and defend rights, when the victims of
oppression stand up manfully for themselves.
There is another element of power added to the anti-slavery
movement, of great importance; it is the conviction, becoming
every day more general and universal, that slavery must be
abolished at the south, or it will demoralize and destroy liberty
at the north. It is the nature of slavery to beget a state of
things all around it favorable to its own continuance. This
fact, connected with the system of bondage, is beginning to be
more fully realized. The slave-holder is not satisfied to
associate with men in the church or in the state, unless he can
thereby stain them with the blood of his slaves. To be a slave-
holder is to be a propagandist from necessity; for slavery can
only live by keeping down the under-growth morality which nature
supplies.
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