10. Bondage for crime, or governmental claims on criminals. Must innocence be punished because guilt suffers penalties?  True, the criminal works for the government without pay; and well he may.  He owes the government.  A century’s work would not pay its drafts on him.  He is a public defaulter, and will die so.  Because laws make men pay their debts, shall those be forced to pay who owe nothing? Besides, the law makes no criminal, PROPERTY.  It restrains his liberty; it makes him pay something, a mere penny in the pound, of his debt to the government; but it does not make him a chattel.  Test it.  To own property is to own its product.  Are children born of convicts government property?  Besides, can property be guilty?  Are chattels punished?

11. Restrictions upon freedom. Children are restrained by parents, wards by guardians, pupils by teachers, patients by physicians and nurses, corporations by charters, and legislators by constitutions.  Embargoes, tariffs, quarantine, and all other laws, keep men from doing as they please.  Restraints are the web of civilized society, warp and woof.  Are they slavery? then civilized society is a mammoth slave—­a government of LAW, the climax of slavery, and its executive a king among slaveholders.

12. Involuntary or compulsory service.  A juryman is empannelled against his will, and sit he must.  A sheriff orders his posse; bystanders must turn in.  Men are compelled to remove nuisances, pay fines and taxes, support their families, and “turn to the right as the law directs,” however much against their wills.  Are they therefore slaves?  To confound slavery with involuntary service is absurd.  Slavery is a condition.  The slave’s feelings toward it, are one thing; the condition itself, the object of these feelings, is another thing; his feelings cannot alter the nature of that condition.  Whether he desire or detest it, the condition remains the same.  The slave’s willingness to be a slave is no palliation of his master’s guilt in holding him.  Suppose the slave verily thinks himself a chattel, and consents that others may so regard him, does that make him a chattel, or make those guiltless who hold him as such?  I may be sick of life, and I tell the assassin so that stabs me; is he any the less a murderer because I consent to be made a corpse?  Does my partnership in his guilt blot out his part of it?  If the slave were willing to be a slave, his voluntariness, so far from lessening the guilt of the “owner,” aggravates it.  If slavery has so palsied his mind and he looks upon himself as a chattel, and consents to be one, actually to hold him as such, falls in with his delusion, and confirms the impious falsehood. These very feelings and convictions of the slave, (if such were possible) increase a hundred fold the guilt of the master in holding him as property, and call upon him in thunder, immediately to recognize him as a MAN, and thus break the sorcery that binds his soul, cheating it of its birth-right, and the consciousness of its worth and destiny.