In a word, do not the three classes of petitions to which you refer, merit, at the hands of those representatives, the candid and patient consideration which, until I read your acknowledgment, that, in relation to these petitions, “there is no substantial difference between” yourself and those, who are in favor of thrusting them aside undebated, unconsidered, and even unread, I always supposed you were willing to have bestowed on them?

I pass to the examination of your charges against the abolitionists.

They contemn the “rights of property."

This charge you prefer against the abolitionists, not because they believe that a Legislature has the right to abolish slavery, nor because they deny that slaves are legally property; for this obvious truth they do not deny.  But you prefer it, because they believe that man cannot rightfully be a subject of property.

Abolitionists believe, to use words, which I have already quoted, that it is “a wild and guilty phantasy, that man can hold property in man.”  They believe, that to claim property in the exalted being, whom God has made in His own image, and but “a little lower than the angels,” is scarcely less absurd than to claim it in the Creator himself.  You take the position, that human laws can rightfully reduce a race of men to property; and that the outrage, to use your own language, is “sanctioned and sanctified” by “two hundred years” continuance of it.  Abolitionists, on the contrary, trace back man’s inalienable self-ownership to enactments of the Divine Legislator, and to the bright morning of time, when he came forth from the hand of his Maker, “crowned with glory and honor,” invested with self-control, and with dominion over the brute and inanimate creation.  You soothe the conscience of the slaveholder, by reminding him, that the relation, which he has assumed towards his down-trodden fellow-man, is lawful.  The abolitionist protests, that the wickedness of the relation is none the less, because it is legalized.  In charging abolitionists with condemning “the rights of property,” you mistake the innocent for the guilty party.  Were you to be so unhappy as to fall into the hands of a kidnapper, and be reduced to a slave, and were I to remonstrate, though in vain, with your oppressor, who would you think was the despiser of “the rights of property”—­myself, or the oppressor?  As you would judge in that case, so judges every slave in his similar case.

The man-stealer’s complaint, that his “rights of property” in his stolen fellow men are not adequately respected by the abolitionist, recalls to my mind a very similar, and but little more ludicrous case of conscientious regard for the “rights of property.”  A traveler was plundered of the whole of his large sum of money.  He pleaded successfully with the robber for a little of it to enable him to reach his home.  But, putting his hand rather deeper into the bag of stolen coins than comported with the views of the robber, he was arrested