The American Convention for promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and improving the Condition of the African Race, having again assembled for the purpose of advancing your best interest, and the welfare of your offspring; deem it expedient, once more to address you as children of one Almighty Parent, and members of the same extended family. The objects we have so long, and so assiduously pursued, are highly interesting to society at large, and infinitely important to you in particular.... For their attainment, we therefore claim your zealous and uniform co-operation. This demand we make with much confidence, as we are persuaded many of you have already verified, in your own experience, the propriety of former recommendations. You have found that industry and economy have procured for you, independence; that temperance has greatly promoted, if not absolutely secured to you, health; and that the cultivation of the faculties of the mind, has enlarged the capacity for discharging your various duties, and for enjoying the numerous benefits you have received. On the contrary, you have seen that idleness, gambling, and dissipation, have uniformly produced poverty and disgrace; that intemperance has generally been the parent of loathsome disease, and the cause of premature death; and that the consequences of ignorance are too frequently, contention and loss. Trusting then, that we can with confidence appeal to your own experience, for a test of the truth of precepts so often inculcated, we beseech you with anxious and tender solicitude to bear them constantly in remembrance, and, with a steady zeal, put them in practice. We are well aware that human nature is frail, and prone to depart from the strait path of rectitude. On this weakness let us not however rely for a justification of our deviations, but rather let it operate as an inducement to double our diligence and increase our caution. Then while we are conscious of having honestly and earnestly endeavored to discharge the duties we owe to our Maker and to each other, we can look with more confidence to our great Creator for pardon of our past transgressions and strength to preserve us from a repetition of them.