Slavery and the North, Slavery—what It Does.

The question of slavery is undeniably, for this country at least, the great question of the age. On the right decision of it depend interests too vast to be fitly set forth in words. Here are three millions of slaves in a land calling itself free; three millions of human beings robbed of every right, and, by statute and custom, among a people self-styled Christian, held as brutes. Knowledge is forbidden, and religious worship, if allowed, is clogged with fetters; the sanctity of marriage is denied; and home and family and all the sacred names of kindred, which form the dialect of domestic love, are made unmeaning words. The soul is crushed, that the body may be safely coined into dollars. And not occasionally, by here and there a hardened villain, reckless alike of justice, law and public sentiment; fearing not God nor regarding man; but on system, and by the combined strength of the whole nation. Most men at the North, and many even at the South, admit that this is wrong, all wrong,—in morals, in policy every way wrong,—that it is a gross injustice to the slave, a serious evil to the master, a great calamity to the country; that it belies the nation’s high professions, brings deep disgrace upon its character, and exposes it to unknown perils and disasters in the time to come.