To a man
of governed passions and virtuous life, it is infinitely better to be an
unmarried freeman, enjoying the comforts of this life, and the hopes of
the life to come, than to live and die a slave, and the parent of an
interminable posterity of slaves. To a being of vicious life and
ungoverned passions, all life is a curse, whether in slavery or freedom;
and it surely is not obligatory on us, or beneficial to the colored man,
to preserve the system of slavery for the sake of perpetuating a
succession of such lives down through coming generations.
Slavery, by forced and artificial means, propagates society from its
lowest and most degraded class, from a race of barbarians held within
its bosom from generation to generation, without being permitted to
share its civilizing influences. It thus propagates barbarism from age
to age, till at last it involves both master and slave in a common ruin.
Freedom recruits the ranks of a nation's population from the homes of
the industrious, the frugal, the strong, the enlightened, the virtuous,
the religious; and leaves the ignorant, the superstitious, the indolent,
the improvident, the vicious, without an offspring, and without a name
in future generations. Freedom places society, by obeying the law of
propagation which God imposed on it, upon an ascending plane of
ever-increasing civilization; slavery, by a forced and unnatural law of
propagation, places it upon a descending plane of ever-deepening vice
and barbarism.
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