Three Years in Europe: Places I Have Seen and People I Have MetBrown, William Wells
History
Three Years in Europe: Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met
Brown, William Wells
Great Britain -- Description and travel
example to America, and he would to heaven his countrymen would follow
the example. The Americans boasted of their superior knowledge, but they
needed not to boast of their superior guilt, for that was set upon a
hill top, and that too, so high, that it required not the lantern of
Diogenes to find it out. Every breeze from the western world brought
upon its wings the groans and cries of the victims of this guilt. Nearly
all countries had fixed the seal of disapprobation on slavery, and when,
at some future age, this stain on the page of history shall be pointed
at, posterity will blush at the discrepancy between American profession
and American practice. What was to be thought of a people boasting of
their liberty, their humanity, their Christianity, their love of
justice, and at the same time keeping in slavery nearly four millions of
God's children, and shutting out from them the light of the Gospel, by
denying the Bible to the slave! (Hear, hear.) No education, no marriage,
everything done to keep the mind of the slave in darkness. There was a
wish on the part of the people of the northern States to shield
themselves from the charge of slave-holding, but as they shared in the
guilt, he was not satisfied with letting them off without their share in
the odium. And now a word about the Fugitive Slave Bill. That measure
was in every respect an unconstitutional measure. It set aside the right
formerly enjoyed by the fugitive of trial by jury--it afforded to him no
protection, no opportunity of proving his right to be free, and it
placed every free coloured person at the mercy of any unprincipled
individual who might wish to lay claim to him. (Hear.) That law is
opposed to the principles of Christianity--foreign alike to the laws of
God and man, it had converted the whole population of the free States
into a band of slave-catchers, and every rood of territory is but so
much hunting ground, over which they might chase the fugitive. But while
they were speaking of slavery in the United States, they must not omit
to mention that there was a strong feeling in that land, not only
against the Fugitive Slave Law, but also against the existence of
slavery in any form. There was a band of fearless men and women in the
city of Boston, whose labours for the slave had resulted in good beyond
calculation. This noble and heroic class had created an agitation in the
whole country, until their principles have taken root in almost every
association in the land, and which, with God's blessing, will, in due
time, cause the Americans to put into practice what they have so long
professed. (Hear, hear.) He wished it to be continually held up before
the country, that the northern States are as deeply implicated in the
guilt of slavery as the South. The north had a population of 13,553,328
freemen; the south had a population of only 6,393,756 freemen; the north
has 152 representatives in the house, the south only 81; and it would be
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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