Returning then to the arguments, I reason against them as if I did not know their author.—­I have distinctly avowed, that the effort to liberate Christian slaves was creditable:  I merely add, that in this respect Christianity is no better than Mohammedism.  But is it really no moral fault,—­is it not a moral enormity,—­to deny that Pagans have human rights?  “That Christianity opened its arms at all to the servile class, was enough.”  Indeed!  Then either unconverted men have no natural right to freedom, or Christians may withhold a natural right from them.  Under the plea of “bringing them to God,” Christians are to deny by law, to every slave who refuses to be converted, the rights of husband and father, rights of persons, rights of property, rights over his own body.  Thus manumission is a bribe to make hypocritical converts, and Christian superiority a plea for depriving men of their dearest rights.  Is not freedom older than Christianity?  Does the Christian recommend his religion to a Pagan by stealing his manhood and all that belongs to it?  Truly, if only Christians have a right to personal freedom, what harm is there in hunting and catching Pagans to make slaves of them?  And this was exactly the “development” of thought and doctrine in the Christian church.  The same priests who taught that Christians have moral rights to their sinews and skin, to their wives and children, and to the fruit of their labour, which Pagans have not, consistently developed the same fundamental idea of Christian superiority into the lawfulness of making war upon the heathen, and reducing them to the state of domestic animals.  If Christianity is to have credit from the former, it must also take the credit of the latter.  If cumulative evidence of its divine origin is found in the fact, that Christendom has liberated Christian slaves, must we forget the cumulative evidence afforded by the assumed right of the Popes to carve out the countries of the heathen, and bestow them with their inhabitants on Christian powers?  Both results flow logically out of the same assumption, and were developed by the same school.

But, I am told, a man must not be freed, until we have ascertained his capacity for self-rule!  This is indeed a tyrannical assumption:  vindicioe secundum servitutem.  Men are not to have their human rights, until we think they will not abuse them!  Prevention is to be used against the hitherto innocent and injured!  The principle involves all that is arrogant, violent, and intrusive, in military tyranny and civil espionage.  Self-rule?  But abolitionists have no thought of exempting men from the penalties of common law, if they transgress the law; we only desire that all men shall be equally subjected to the law, and equally protected by it.  It is truly a strange inference, that because a man is possibly deficient in virtue, therefore he shall not be subject to public law, but to private caprice:  as if this