The bill on the subject of slaves, was a mere digest of the existing laws respecting them, without any intimation of a plan for a future and general emancipation.  It was thought better that this should be kept back, and attempted only by way of amendment, whenever the bill should be brought on.  The principles of the amendment, however, were agreed on, that is to say, the freedom of all born after a certain day, and deportation at a proper age.  But it was found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition, nor will it bear it even at this day.  Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow.  Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.  Nature, habit, opinion, have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.  It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degree, as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be, pari passu, filled up by free white laborers.  If, on the contrary, it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up.  We should in vain look for an example in the Spanish deportation or deletion of the Moors.  This precedent would fall far short of our case.

I considered four of these bills, passed or reported, as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.  The repeal of the laws of entail would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth, in select families, and preserve the soil of the country from being daily more and more absorbed in mortmain.  The abolition of primogeniture, and equal partition of inheritances, removed the feudal and unnatural distinctions which made one member of every family rich, and all the rest poor, substituting equal partition, the best of all Agrarian laws.  The restoration of the rights of conscience relieved the people from taxation for the support of a religion not theirs; for the establishment was truly of the religion of the rich, the dissenting sects being entirely composed of the less wealthy people; and these, by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government:  and all this would be effected, without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen.  To these, too, might be added, as a further security, the introduction of the trial by jury into the Chancery courts, which have already ingulphed, and continue to ingulph, so great a proportion of the jurisdiction over our property.