this construction of duty, be the doing of good to one another.  Think you, sir, that the universal exercise of this right would promote the fulfilment of the “new commandment that ye love one another?” Think you, it would be the harbinger of millenial peace and blessedness?  Or, think you not, rather, that it would fully and frightfully realize the prophet’s declaration:  “They all lie in wait for blood:  they hunt every man his neighbor with a net.”

If any people have a right to enslave their fellow men, it must be the Jews, if they once had it.  But if they ever had it, it ceased, when all their peculiar rights ceased.  In respect to rights from the Most High, they are now on the same footing with other races of men.  When “the vail of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom,” then that distinction from the Gentile, in which the Jew had gloried, ceased, and the partition wall between them was prostrate for ever.  The Jew, as well as the Gentile, was never more to depart from the general morality of the Bible.  He was never again to be under any special statutes, whose requirements should bring him into collision with that morality:  He was no more to confine his sympathies and friendships within the narrow range of the twelve tribes:  but every son and daughter of Adam were thenceforth entitled to claim from him the heart and hand of a brother.  “Under the glorious dispensation of the gospel,” says the immortal Granville Sharp, “we are absolutely bound to consider ourselves as citizens of the world; every man whatever, without any partial distinction of nation, distance, or complexion, must necessarily be esteemed our neighbor and our brother; and we are absolutely bound, in Christian duty, to entertain a disposition towards all mankind, as charitable and benevolent, at least, as that which was required of the Jews under the law towards their brethren; and, consequently, it is absolutely unlawful for those who call themselves Christians, to exact of their brethren (I mean their brethren of the universe) a more burthensome service, than that to which the Jews were limited with respect to their brethren of the house of Israel; and the slavery or involuntary bondage of a brother Israelite was absolutely forbid.”

It occurs to me, that after all which has been said to satisfy you, that compulsory servitude, if such there were among the Jews, cannot properly be pleaded in justification of yours; a question may still be floating in your mind whether, if God directed his chosen people to enslave the Heathen, slavery should not be regarded as a good system of servitude?  Just as pertinently may you ask, whether that is not a good system of servitude, which is found in some of our state prisons.  Punishment probably—­certainly not labor—­is the leading object in the one case as well as the other:  and the labor of the bondman in the one, as well as of the convict in the other, constitutes but a subordinate consideration.