to the West. They have no right to the mediation of justice of the peace or jury between them and chains and lashes. They have no right to wages for their labor; no right to the Sabbath; no right to the institution of marriage; no right to letters or to self-defese. A small class of owners, rendered unfeeling and even unconscious and unreflecting by habit, and a large part of them ignorant and vicious, stand between them and their Government, destroying its sovereignty. This Government has not the power even to regulate the number of lashes that its subjects may receive. It cannot say that they shall receive thirty-nine instead of forty. To a large and growing class of its subjects it can secure neither justice, moderation, nor the advantages of the Christian religion; and if it cannot protect all its subjects it can protect none, either white or black.

It is nearly a hundred years since our people first declared to the nations of the world that all men are born free, and still we have not made our declaration good. Highly revolutionary means have since then been adopted by the admission of Missouri and the annexation of Texas in favor of slavery by the barest majority of votes, while the highly slavery, and still slavery exists-even, moreover, although two thirds of the blood in the veins of our slaves is from our own race. If sanguine still with our own, the danger of a violent revolution, over which wean have no control, must become more imminent every day.

By a course of undecided action, a determined by no policy but the vague will of a war-distracted people, we run the risk of precipitating that very revolutionary violence which we seem seeking to avoid.

Let us regard for a moment the elements of such a revolution. Many of the slaves here have been sold away the border States as a punishment, being too refectory to be dealt with there in the face of the civilization of the North. They come here with a knowledge of the Christian religion, with its germs planted and expanding as it were in s the dark, rich soil of their African nature, with a feeling of relationship with the families from which they came, and with a sense of unmerited banishment, as culprits--al of which tends to bring upon them a greater severity of treatment and a corresponding disinclination "to receive punishment." They are far superior beings to their ancestors, who were brought from Africa two generations ago, and who occasionally rebelled against comparatively less severe punishment than is inflicted now. While rising in the scale of Christian beings their treatment is being rendered more severe than ever. The whip, the chains, the stocks, and imprisonments are no mere fancies here; they are used to any extent to which the imagination of civilized man may moral; for while the slave appeals to the moral law as his vindication, clinging to it as to very horns of the altar of his safety and his hope, the master seldom hesitates to wrest him from it with violence and contempt. The slave, it is ture, bears no resentment; he asks for no punishment for his master; he simply claims justice for himself; and it is this feature of his condition that promises more terror to the retribution when it comes. Even now the whites stand accused by their oppression of humanity, being subject to a degree of confusion, chaos, and enslavement to error and wrong which Northern society could not credit or comprehend.

Added to the four millions of the colored race, whose disaffection is increasing even more rapidly than their numbers, there are at least