“Every year thousands of women are lashed for obstinate virtue, and tens of thousands robbed of what they have never been taught to prize, and the _Journal_ stands poised to cast its javelin at that meddlesome pulpit that dares speak of such boundless licentiousness, and send it to its more appropriate work of evangelizing the courtesans of Paris or the loose virtue of Italy! And it assures us that multitudes of clergymen are thanking it for such a noble stand. Some of those clergymen we know. The platforms of our benevolent societies resound with their voices, urging Christianity to go abroad, stimulating the Church not to leave a corner of the globe unsearched nor an evil unredressed. But when the speech is ended they steal in behind the _Journal_ to give it thanks for its noble stand against the right of the pulpit to say a word about home-heathen—about their horrible ignorance, bottomless licentiousness, and about the mercenary inhumanity which every week is selling their own Christian brethren, baptized as much as they, often preachers of the Gospel like themselves, eating from the same table of the Lord, praying to the same Saviour, listening to snatches of that same Bible (whose letters they have never been permitted to learn), out of which these reverend endorsers of the _Journal_ preach!” He shows that the slavery of New England never was the slavery of the South: “The slavery of the South in our day adopts the Roman civil law as the basis of its code.... Now, New England never held a slave on the basis of the Roman civil law, but under a law which was expressly enacted for the benefit of the slave and for the ultimate destruction of slavery—viz., the _Hebrew law of slavery_. No system of slavery, in this land, can be profitable which does not put the slave under a regimen which denies him the rights of manhood. The North, on the basis of the Hebrew slavery law, found it out; she refused to go further and sacrifice her religious scruples. The South, on the basis of the Roman civil law, imbibed its inhuman spirit, put on the screws, and forced the system into its present legal attitude, with a written code more infamous than the unwritten law of any pirate’s deck.” He proves that the North never sold out her slaves, with a profit, to “her partners in the South, and so closed up the business,” by showing that in most of the Northern States the slaves were set free by the decisions of the courts upon the adoption of the State constitutions, and that in the meantime their masters were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to sell them South. In New York gradual emancipation was enacted, and not only was the sale of slaves out of the borders forbidden, but masters travelling with their slaves in the South were required to give heavy bonds for the safe return of the same. These words reveal his own spirit in the discussion: