“But the worst is not told. As a consequence of criminal connections, many a master has children born into slavery. Of these, most, I presume, receive protection, perhaps indulgence, during the life of the fathers; but at their death, not a few are left to the chances of a cruel bondage. These cases must have increased since the difficulties of emancipation have been multiplied. Still more, it is to be feared that there are cases in which the master puts his own children under the whip of the overseer, or sells them to undergo the miseries of a bondage among strangers. “I should rejoice to learn that my impressions on this point are false. If they be true, then our own country, calling itself enlightened and Christian, is defiled with one of the greatest enormities on earth. We send missionaries to heathen lands. Among the pollutions of heathenism, I know nothing worse than this. The heathen who feasts on his country’s foe, may hold up his head by the side of the Christian who sells his child for gain, sells him to be a slave. God forbid that I should charge this crime to a people! But, however rarely it may occur, it is a fruit of slavery, an exercise of power belonging to slavery, and no laws restrain or punish it. Such are the evils which spring naturally from the licentiousness generated by slavery.” The owner of slaves who acts in conformity to the foregoing picture, to our mind displays proofs of very great debasement, and his offspring, stained with the blood of Ham, we should deem most likely to be quite fit subjects of slavery: we cannot therefore regret that the laws do not punish nor restrain him from selling them as slaves; we should rather regret that the laws did not compel him to go with them. That there are instances in the Slave States where the owner of female slaves cohabits with them, and has offspring by them, is true. There may be instances where such parent has sold them into slavery,—they, in law, being his slaves; yet we aver we have never known an instance in which it has been done. That such offspring have been sold as slaves, by the operation of law, must certainly be acknowledged; and that such instances have been more frequent since the action of the abolitionists has aroused the Slave States to a sense of their danger, and thereby caused the laws to be more stringent on the subject of emancipation, is also true. And are you, ye agitators of the slave question, willing to acknowledge this fact? And that your conduct—even you yourselves—are even now the cause, under God, of the present condition of slavery, which many such persons now endure? Is not he who places the obstruction on the highway, whereby the traveller is plunged in death, the guilty one? In what light, think ye, must this class of slaves view you and your conduct? But we wish not to upbraid you. If you are ignorant, words are useless. If you are honest men and know the truth, we prefer to leave you in the hands of God and your own conscience.