Viii: first assumption.
Of course I begin with the assumption of fact, which must be treated at length. It was the often-quoted remark of John Wesley, who knew well how to use words, as also how to touch hearts, that Slavery is ‘the sum of all villainies.’ The phrase is pungent; but it were rash in any of us to criticise the testimony of that illustrious founder of Methodism, whose ample experience of Slavery in Georgia and the Carolinas seems to have been all condensed in this sententious judgment. Language is feeble to express all the enormity of an institution which is now exalted as in itself a form of civilization, ‘ennobling’ at least to the master, if not to the slave. Look at it as you will, and it is always the scab, the canker, the ‘barebones,’ and the shame of the country,—wrong, not merely in the abstract, as is often admitted by its apologists, but wrong in the concrete also, and possessing no single element of right. Look at it in the light of principle, and it is nothing less than a huge insurrection against the eternal law of God, involving in its pretensions the denial of all human rights, and also the denial of that Divine Law in which God himself is manifest, thus being practically the grossest lie and the grossest atheism. Founded in violence, sustained only by violence, such a wrong must by sure law of compensation blast master as well as slave,—blast the lands on which they live, blast the community of which they are part, blast the government which does not forbid the outrage; and the longer it exists and the more completely it prevails, must its vengeful influences penetrate the whole social system. Barbarous in origin, barbarous in law, barbarous in all its pretensions, barbarous in the instruments it employs, barbarous in consequences, barbarous in spirit, barbarous wherever it shows itself, Slavery must breed Barbarians, while it develops everywhere, alike in the individual and the society to which he belongs, the essential elements of Barbarism. In this character it is conspicuous before the world. Undertaking now to expose the Barbarism of Slavery, the whole broad field is open before me. There is nothing in its character, its manifold wrong, its wretched results, and especially in its influence on [317] the class claiming to be ‘ennobled’ by it, that will not fall naturally under consideration.
