It is said, I know, that the ignorance of the slave is necessary to the security of the master, and the quiet of the state; and this is said truly. Slavery and knowledge cannot live together. To enlighten the slave is to break his chain. To make him harmless, he must be kept blind. He cannot be left to read in an enlightened age, without endangering his master; for what can he read which will not give, at least, some hint of his wrongs? Should his eye chance to fall on "the Declaration of Independence," how would the truth glare on him, "that all men are born free and equal"! All knowledge furnishes arguments against slavery. From every subject light would break forth to reveal his inalienable and outraged rights. The very exercise of his intellect would give him the consciousness of being made for something more than a slave. I agree to the necessity laid on his master to keep him in darkness. And what stronger argument against slavery can be conceived? It compels the master to degrade, systematically, the mind of the slave; to war against human intelligence; to resist that improvement which is the end of the Creator. "Wo to him that taketh away the key of knowledge!" To kill the body is a great crime. The Spirit we cannot kill, but we can bury it in deathlike lethargy; and is this a light crime in the sight of its Maker? Let it not be said, that almost every where the laboring classes are doomed to ignorance, deprived of the means of instruction. The intellectual advantages of the laboring freeman, who is entrusted with the care of himself, raise him far above the slave; and, accordingly, superior minds are constantly seen to issue from the less educated classes. Besides, in free communities, philanthropy is not forbidden to labor for the improvement of the ignorant. The obligation of the prosperous and instructed to elevate their less favored brethren is taught, and not taught in vain. Benevolence is making perpetual encroachments on the domain of ignorance and crime. In communities, on the other hand, cursed with slavery, half the population, sometimes more, are given up, intentionally and systematically, to hopeless ignorance. To raise this mass to intelligence and self-government is a crime. The sentence of perpetual degradation is passed on a large portion of the human race. In this view, how great the ill desert of slavery!