With regard to the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the southern colonies, it has been proposed, I know, to reduce it by declaring a general enfranchisement of their slaves.  This project has had its advocates and panegyrists; yet I never could argue myself into any opinion of it.  Slaves are often much attached to their masters.  A general wild offer of liberty would not always be accepted.  History furnishes few instances of it.  It is sometimes as hard to persuade slaves to be free as it is to compel freemen to be slaves; and in this auspicious scheme we should have both these pleasing tasks on our hands at once.  But when we talk of enfranchisement, do we not perceive that the American master may enfranchise, too, and arm servile hands in defence of freedom?—­a measure to which other people have had recourse more than once, and not without success, in a desperate situation of their affairs.

Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which has sold them to their present masters,—­from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic?  An offer of freedom from England would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African vessel, which is refused an entry into the ports of Virginia or Carolina, with a cargo of three hundred Angola negroes.  It would be curious to see the Guinea captain attempting at the same instant to publish his proclamation of liberty and to advertise his sale of slaves.

But let us suppose all these moral difficulties got over.  The ocean remains.  You cannot pump this dry; and as long as it continues in its present bed, so long all the causes which weaken authority by distance will continue.

    “Ye Gods! annihilate but space and time,
     And make two lovers happy,”

was a pious and passionate prayer,—­but just as reasonable as many of the serious wishes of very grave and solemn politicians.

If, then, Sir, it seems almost desperate to think of any alterative course for changing the moral causes (and not quite easy to remove the natural) which produce prejudices irreconcilable to the late exercise of our authority, but that the spirit infallibly will continue, and, continuing, will produce such effects as now embarrass us,—­the second mode under consideration is, to prosecute that spirit in its overt acts, as criminal.

At this proposition I must pause a moment.  The thing seems a great deal too big for my ideas of jurisprudence.  It should seem, to my way of conceiving such matters, that there is a very wide difference, in reason and policy, between the mode of proceeding on the irregular conduct of scattered individuals, or even of bands of men, who disturb order within the state, and the civil dissensions which may, from time to time, on great questions, agitate the several communities which