"He [the king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL nations, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another." Mr. Jefferson says, "It was struck out in _compliance to South Carolina and Georgia_, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under it, for though their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others." * * * * * But the orator went on protesting against righteousness:-- "I would beseech them [the Abolitionists] to discard their dangerous abstractions [that men are endowed by their Creator with certain natural, equal, and unalienable Rights--to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness] which they [in common with the Declaration of Independence] adopt as universal rules of human conduct--without regard to time, condition, or circumstances; which _darken the understanding and mislead the judgment_, and urge them forward to consequences from which they will shrink back with horror. I would ask them to reflect that ... the religion they profess is not to be advanced by forgetting the precepts and the example of their Divine Master. Upon that example I would ask them to pause. He found Slavery, Roman Slavery, an institution of the country in which he lived. Did he denounce it? Did he attempt its immediate abolition? Did he do any thing, or say any thing which could in its remotest tendency encourage resistance and violence? No, his precept was, 'Servants (Slaves) obey your Masters.'"[183] "It was because _he would not interfere with the administration of the laws, or abrogate their authority_."