law in question, under this view of it, would be tolerated by the spirit of Southern slavery?—­and whether, before obedience would be rendered to it, you would not need to have a different type of servitude, in the place of slavery?  You would—­I know you would—­for you have been put to the trial.  When, by a happy providence, a vessel was driven, the last year, to a West India island, and the chains of the poor slaves with which it was filled fell from around them, under freedom’s magic power, the exasperated South was ready to go to war with Great Britain. Then, the law against delivering up foreign servants to their masters was not relished by you.  The given case comes most strikingly within the supposed policy of this law.  The Gentile was to be permitted to remain in the land to which he had fled, and where he would have advantages for becoming acquainted with the God of the Bible.  Such advantages are they enjoying who escaped from the confessed heathenism of Southern slavery to the island in question.  They are now taught to read that “Book of life,” which before, they were forbidden to read.  But again, suppose a slave were to escape from a West India island into the Southern States—­would you, with your “domestic institutions,” of which you are so jealous, render obedience to this Divine law?  No; you would subject him for ever to a servitude more severe than that, from which he had escaped.  Indeed, if a freeman come within a certain portion of our Southern country, and be so unhappy as to bear a physical resemblance to the slave, he will be punished for that resemblance, by imprisonment, and even by a reduction to slavery.

2d.  Southern slaveholders, who, by their laws, own men as absolutely as they own cattle, would have it believed, that Jewish masters thus owned their fellow-men.  If they did, why was there so wide a difference between the commandment respecting the stray man, and that respecting the stray ox or ass?  The man was not, but the beasts were, to be returned; and that too, even though their owner was the enemy of him who met them. (Ex. 23. 4.) I repeat the question;—­why this difference?  The only answer is, because God made the brute to be the property of man; but He never gave us our noble nature for such degradation.  Man’s title deed, in the eighth Psalm, extends his right of property to the inanimate and brute creation only—­not to the flesh and bones and spirit of his fellow-man.

3d.  The very different penalties annexed to the crime of stealing a man, and to that of stealing a thing, shows the eternal and infinite difference which God has established between a man and property.  The stealing of a man was surely to be punished with death; whilst mere property was allowed to atone for the offence of stealing property.

4th.  Who, if not the slave, can be said to be vexed and oppressed!  But God’s command to his people was, that they should neither “vex a stranger, nor oppress him.”