Permit me to call your attention to a few of the numberless evidences, that slavery is a poor school for “moral preparation” for freedom. 1st.  Slavery turns its victims into thieves.  “Who should be astonished,” says Thomas S. Clay, a very distinguished slaveholder of Georgia, “if the negro takes from the field or corn-house the supplies necessary for his craving appetite and then justifies his act, and denies that it is stealing?” What debasement in the slave does the same gentleman’s remedy for theft indicate?  “If,” says he, “the negro is informed, that if he does not steal, he shall receive rice as an allowance; and if he does steal, he shall not, a motive is held out which will counteract the temptation to pilfer.” 2nd.  Slavery reeks with licentiousness.  Another son of the South says, that the slaveholder’s kitchen is a brothel, and a southern village a Sodom.  The elaborate defence of slavery by Chancellor Harper of South Carolina justifies the heaviest accusations, that have been brought against it on the score of licentiousness.  How could you blame us for deeply abhorring slavery, even were we to view it in no other light than that in which the Dews and Harpers and its other advocates present it? 3rd.  Slavery puts the master in the place of God, and the master’s law in the place of God’s law!  “The negro,” says Thomas S. Clay, “is seldom taught to feel, that he is punished for breaking God’s law!  He only knows his master as law-giver and executioner, and the sole object held up to his view is to make him a more obedient and profitable slave.  He oftener hears that he shall be punished if he steals, than if he breaks the Sabbath or swears; and thus he sees the very threatenings of God brought to bear on his master’s interests.  It is very manifest to him, that his own good is very far from forming the primary reason for his chastisement:  his master’s interests are to be secured at all events;—­God’s claims are secondary, or enforced merely for the purpose of advancing those of his owner.  His own benefit is the residuum after this double distillation of moral motive—­a mere accident.” 4th.  The laws of nearly all the slave-states forbid the teaching of the slaves to read.  The abundant declarations, that those laws are without exception, a consequence of the present agitation of the question of slavery are glaringly false.  Many of these laws were enacted long before this agitation; and some of them long before you and I were born.  Say the three hundred and fifty-three gentlemen of the District of Abbeville and Edgefield in South Carolina, who, the last year, broke up a system of oral religious instruction, which the Methodist Conference of that State had established amongst their slaves:  “Intelligence and slavery have no affinity for each other.”  And when those same gentlemen declare, that “verbal and lecturing instruction will increase a desire with the black population to learn”—­that “the progress and diffusion of knowledge will be a consequence”—­and