12. 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, is another thing; his feelings cannot alter the nature of that condition.  Whether he desires or detests it, the condition remains the same.  The slave’s willingness to be a slave is no palliation of the slaveholder’s guilt.  Suppose the slave should think himself a chattel, and consent to be so regarded by others, 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?  Does my consent to his crime, atone for it? my partnership in his guilt, blot out his part of it?  The slave’s willingness to be a slave, so far from lessening the guilt of the “owner,” aggravates it.  If slavery has so palsied his mind that 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, and call upon him in thunder, immediately to recognize him as a man and thus break the sorcery that cheats him out of his birthright—­the consciousness of his worth and destiny.

Many of the foregoing conditions are appendages of slavery.  But no one, nor all of them together, constitute its intrinsic unchanging element.

We proceed to state affirmatively that, ENSLAVING MEN IS REDUCING THEM TO ARTICLES OF PROPERTY—­making free agents, chattels—­converting persons into things—­sinking immortality, into merchandize.  A slave is one held in this condition.  In law, “he owns nothing, and can acquire nothing.”  His right to himself is abrogated.  If he say my hands, my feet, my body, my mind, MY self, they are figures of speech.  To use himself for his own good, is a CRIME.  To keep what he earns, is stealing.  To take his body into his own keeping, is insurrection.  In a word, the profit of his master is made the END of his being, and he, a mere means to that end—­a mere means to an end into which his interests do not enter, of which they constitute no portion[A].  MAN, sunk to a thing! the intrinsic element, the principle of slavery; MEN, bartered, leased, mortgaged, bequeathed, invoiced, shipped in cargoes, stored as goods, taken on executions, and knocked off at public outcry!  Their rights,