that “a progressive system of improvement will be introduced, that will ultimately revolutionize our civil institutions,” they admit, that the prohibition of “intelligence” to the slaves is the settled and necessary policy of slavery, and not, as you would have us believe, a temporary expedient occasioned by the present “agitation of this subject of abolition.” 5th.  Slavery—­the system, which forbids marriage and the reading of the Bible—­does of necessity turn its subjects into heathens.  A Report of the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, made five years ago, says:  “Who could credit it, that in these years of revival and benevolent effort—­that, in this Christian Republic, there are over two millions of human beings in the condition of heathen, and in some respects in a worse condition?  They may be justly considered the heathen of this Christian country, and will bear comparison with heathen in any country in the world.”  I will finish what I have to say on this point of “moral preparation” for freedom, with the remark, that the history of slavery in no country warrants your implication, that slaves acquire such “moral preparation.”  The British Parliament substituted an apprenticeship for slavery with the express design, that it should afford a “moral preparation” for freedom.  And yet, if you will read the reports of late visitors to the British West Indies, you will find, that the planters admit, that they made no use of the advantages of the apprenticeship to prepare their servants for liberty.  Their own gain—­not the slaves’—­was their ruling motive, during the term of the apprenticeship, as well as preceding it.

Another of your charges is, that the abolitionists “have increased the rigors of legislation against slaves in most if not all the slave States.”

And suppose, that our principles and measures have occasioned this evil—­are they therefore wrong?—­and are we, therefore, involved in sin?  The principles and measures of Moses and Aaron were the occasion of a similar evil.  Does it follow, that those principles and measures were wrong, and that Moses and Aaron were responsible for the sin of Pharaoh’s increased oppressiveness?  The truth, which Jesus Christ preached on the earth, is emphatically peace:  but its power on the depravity of the human heart made it the occasion of division and violence.  That depravity was the guilty cause of the division and violence.  The truth was but the innocent occasion of them.  To make it responsible for the effects of that depravity would be as unreasonable, as it is to make the holy principles of the anti-slavery cause responsible for the wickedness which they occasion:  and to make the great Preacher Himself responsible for the division and violence, would be but to carry out the absurdity, of which the public are guilty, in holding abolitionists responsible for the mobs, which are got up against them.  These mobs, by the way, are called “abolition mobs.”  A similar misnomer would pronounce the mob, that should tear down your house and shoot your wife, “Henry Clay’s mob.”  Harriet Martineau, in stating the fact, that the mobs of 1834, in the city of New York, were set down to the wrong account, says, that the abolitionists were told, that “they had no business to scare the city with the sight of their burning property and demolished churches!”