And first it must be always borne in mind, that Slavery, as a system, is based on the most audacious, inhuman, and self-evident of lies,—­the assertion, namely, that property can be held in men.  Property applies to things.  There is a meta-physical impossibility implied in the attempt to extend its application to persons.  It is possible, we admit, to ordain by local law that four and four make ten, but such an exercise of legislative wisdom could not overcome certain arithmetical prejudices innate in our minds, or dethrone the stubborn eight from its accustomed position in our thoughts.  But you might as well ordain that four and four make ten as ordain that a man has no right to himself, but can properly be held as the chattel of another.  Yet this arrogant falsehood of property in men has been organized into a colossal institution.  The South calls it a “peculiar” institution; and herein perhaps consists its peculiarity, that it is an absurdity which has lied itself into a substantial form, and now argues its right to exist from the fact of its existence.  Doubtless, the fact that a thing exists proves that it has its roots in human nature; but before we accept this as decisive of its right to exist, it may be well to explore those qualities in human nature, “peculiar” and perverse as itself, from which it derives its poisonous vitality and strength.  It is plain, we think, that an institution embodying an essential falsity, which equally affronts the common sense and the moral sense of mankind, and which, as respects chronology, was as repugnant to the instincts of Homer as it is to the instincts of Whittier, must have sprung from the unblessed union of wilfulness and avarice, of avarice which knows no conscience, and of wilfulness that tramples on reason; and the marks of this parentage, the signs of these its boasted roots in human nature, are, we are constrained to concede, visible in every stage of its growth, in every argument for its existence, in every motive for its extension.

It is not, perhaps, surprising that some of the advocates of Slavery do not relish the analysis which reveals the origin of their institution in those dispositions which connect man with the tiger and the wolf.  Accordingly they discourage, with true democratic humility, all genealogical inquiries into the ancestry of their system, substitute generalization for analysis, and, twisting the maxims of religion into a philosophy of servitude, bear down all arguments with the sounding proposition, that Slavery is included in the plan of God’s providence, and therefore cannot be wrong.  Certain thinkers of our day have asserted the universality of the religious element in human nature:  and it must be admitted that men become very pious when their minds are illuminated by the discernment of a Providential sanction for their darling sins, and by the discovery that God is on the side of their interests and passions.  Napoleon’s religious perceptions were somewhat obtuse, as tried by the standards of