small percentage are natural tyrants.  That percentage is no larger in the slave States than in the free.  The great majority, South as well as North, have human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they can of their sensibility to physical pain.  These sympathies in the bosoms of the Southern people manifest in many ways their sense of the wrong of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the negro.  If they deny this let me address them a few plain questions.

In 1820 you joined the North almost unanimously in declaring the African slave-trade piracy, and in annexing to it the punishment of death.  Why did you do this?  If you did not feel that it was wrong, why did you join in providing that men should be hung for it?  The practice was no more than bringing wild negroes from Africa to such as would buy them.  But you never thought of hanging men for catching and selling wild horses, wild buffaloes, or wild bears.

Again, you have among you a sneaking individual of the class of native tyrants known as the slave-dealer.  He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave at a speculating price.  If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door.  You despise him utterly; you do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man.  Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer’s children.  If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him.  It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony,—­instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact.  If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family.  Now, why is this?  You do not so treat the man who deals in cotton, corn, or tobacco.

And yet again.  There are in the United States and Territories, including the District of Columbia, over four hundred and thirty thousand free blacks.  At five hundred dollars per head, they are worth over two hundred millions of dollars.  How comes this vast amount of property to be running about without owners?  We do not see free horses or free cattle running at large.  How is this?  All these free blacks are the descendants of slaves, or have been slaves themselves; and they would be slaves now but for something that has operated on their white owners, inducing them at vast pecuniary sacrifice to liberate them.  What is that something?  Is there any mistaking it?  In all these cases it is your sense of justice and human sympathy continually telling you that the poor negro has some natural right to himself,—­that those who deny it and make mere merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt, and death.

And now why will you ask us to deny the humanity of the slave, and estimate him as only the equal of the hog?  Why ask us to do what you will not do yourselves?  Why ask us to do for nothing what two hundred millions of dollars could not induce you to do?