Your committee would not thus favorably regard the prayer of the memorialists, if it sought to impair, in the slightest degree, the rights of private property. [Report of the committee of the House of Representatives of the United States, on the memorial of the President and Board of Managers of the Colonization Society.-Second Annual Report.]

The Society has at all times recognised the constitutional and LEGITIMATE existence of slavery.'-[Tenth Annual Report.]

The Society protests that it has no designs on the rights of the master in the slave or the property in his slave, which the laws guarantee to him.'--[Fourteenth Annual Report.]

'Something he must yet be allowed to say, as regarded the object the Society was set up to accomplish. This object, if he understood it aright, involved no intrusion on property, NOR EVEN UPON PREJUDICE.'-[Fifteenth Annual Report.]

To the slaveholder, who had charged upon them the wicked design of interfering with the RIGHTS OF PROPERTY under the specious pretext of removing a vicious and dangerous free population, they address themselves in a tone of conciliation and sympathy. We know your rights, say they, and we respect them.' * * 6 Equally absurd and false is the objection, that this Society seeks indirectly to disturb the rights of property, and to interfere with the well established relation subsisting between master and slave.'—[African Repository, vol. vii. pp. 100, 228.]

'I repeat, that though not a slaveholder, yet I think that every man ought to be protected in his property, and as the laws of our country have decreed that negroes are property, every person that holds a slave, according to these laws, ought to be protected.'-[ A new and interesting View of Slavery.' By Humauitas, a colonization advocate. Baltimore, 1820.]

'We are made to disregard this description of property, and to touch without reserve the rights of our neighbors.'-[Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the New-Jersey Colonization Society.]

Thus the American Colonization Society shamelessly surrenders the claims of justice, and leaves the enemies of oppression weaponless! Hence it rejects the proposition, that man cannot hold property in man; and we are called upon to prove that which is self-evident. No accidental differences of condition or complexion—no vicissitudes of fortune—no reprisal or purchase or inheritance, can justly make one individual the slave of another. When God created man, he gave him dominion over the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field; but not over his fellow man. 'All men are born free and equal,' and are made of one blood.' Shall we look to wealth as giving one a title to the labor and freedom of another? Wealth is the creature of circumstances, and not an arbitrary law of nature. It takes to itself wings, and flies away; and he who is an opulent tyrant to

day, may on this principle be an impoverished slave to-morrow. Does physical strength make valid this claim? This, too, is evanescent: sickness and age would ultimately degrade the most muscular tyrants to servitude; and mankind would be composed of but two parties—the strong and the weak. Can high birth annul the rights of the lower classes? There is no difference at their birth, between the children of the beggar and those of the king. We brought nothing into this world,' says an inspired apostle, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.' Man is created a rational being; and therefore he is a subject of moral government, and accountable. Being rational and accountable, he is bound to improve his mind and intellect. With this design, his Creator has outstretched the heavens, and set the sun in his course, and hung out the burning jewels of the sky, and spread abroad the green earth, and poured out the seas, that he might steadily progress in knowledge.

.

The slaves are men; they were born, then, as free as their masters; they cannot be property; and he who denies them an opportunity to improve their faculties, comes into collision with Jehovah, and incurs a fearful responsibility. But we know that they are not treated like rational beings, and that oppression almost entirely obliterates their sense of moral obligation to God or man.

I fully coincide in opinion with the authoress of a work entitled, IMMEDIATE, NOT GRADUAL ABOLITION,' that the holder of a slave, whether he obtained him by purchase or by inheritance, is as guilty as the original thief.* The wretch who stole him could by no possible means acquire or transmit the right to make a slave of him, or to keep him in slavery. He has a right to his liberty :-through whatever number of transfers the usurpation of it may have passed, the right is undiminished.

*The owners of slaves are licensed robbers, and not the just proprietors of what they claim: freeing them is not depriving them of property, but restoring it to the right owner; it is suffering the unlawful captive to escape. It is not wronging the master, but doing justice to the slave, restoring him to himself. Emancipation would only take away property that is its own property, and not ours; property that has the same right to possess us, as we have to possess it; property that has the same right to convert our children into dogs and calves and colts, as we have to convert theirs into these beasts; property that may transfer our children to strangers, by the same right that we transfer theirs.-Rice.

No man, says Algernon Sidney, can have a right over others, unless it be by them granted to him: That which is not just, is not law; and that which is not law, ought not to be in force: Whosoever grounds his pretensions of right upon usurpation and tyranny, declares himself to be an usurper and a tyrant—that is, an enemy to God and man-and to have no right at all: That which was unjust in its beginning, can of itself never change its nature: HE WHO PERSISTS IN DOING INJUSTICE, AGGRAVATES IT, AND TAKES UPON HIMSELF ALL THE GUILT OF HIS PREDECESSORS: The right to be free is a truth planted in the hearts of men, and acknowledged so to be by all who have hearkened to the voice of nature, and disproved by none but such as through wickedness, stupidity, or baseness of spirit, seem to have degenerated into the worst of beasts, and to have retained nothing of men but the outward shape, or the ability of doing those mischiefs which they have learnt from their master the devil.

The following is the indignant, emphatic, eloquent language of HENRY BROUGHAM, on the subject of slave property :

Tell me not of rights—talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves. I DENY THE RIGHT-I ACKNOWLEDGE NOT THE PROPERTY. The principles, the feelings of our common nature, rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal made to the understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it. In vain you tell me of the laws that sanction such a claim! There is a law above all the enactments of human codes-the same throughout the world, the same in all times—such as it was before the daring genius of Columbus pierced the night of ages, and opened to one world the sources of power, wealth and knowledge; to another, all unutterable woes ;— such it is at this day it is the law written by the finger of God on the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy, that man can hold property in man! In vain you appeal to treaties, to covenants between nations. The covenants of the Almighty, whether the old or the new, denounce such unholy pretensions. To those laws did they of old refer, who maintained the African trade. Such treaties did they cite, and not untruly; for by one shameful compact, you bartered the glories of Blenheim for the traffic in blood. Yet, in despite of law and of treaties, that infernal traffic is now destroyed, and its votaries put to death like other pirates. How came this change to pass? Not assuredly by parliament leading the way; but the country at length awoke; the indignation of the people was kindled; it descended in thunder, and smote the traffic, and scattered its guilty profits to the winds. Now, then, let the planters beware-let their assemblies beware-let the government at home beware-let the parliament beware! the same country is once more awake,-awake to the condition of negro slavery ; the same indignation kindles in the bosom of the same people; the same cloud is gathering that annihilated the slave trade; and, if it shall descend again, they, on whom its crash shall fall, will not be destroyed before I have warned them; but I pray that their destruction may turn away from us the more terrible judgments of God!'

Is this the language of fanaticism? Is Henry Brougham a madman ?

The following extracts must close the evidence in support of my third allegation, that the Colonization Society disregards the fundamental principle of human liberty and equality, that man cannot hold property in man:

'Let me ask, who can wish under existing circumstances that the constitution should be altered, when it must bring with it a violation of property-and when that violation of private property must engender such hostility of feelings, and elicit such bitter vituperation? The whole Union would feel a concussion, and no one can count the costs of the contest.' * * * By means of our colony, they may remove their slaves and restore them to freedom-and at the same time no way jeopardize the safety of themselves or their property.'— [Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the New-Jersey Colonization Society.]

The establishment of our colony will afford facilities to proprietors for completing in Africa the exercise of the right which can only be partially exercised in this country, of disposing of our property, in our own way, without injury to the community.'—[Fourteenth Annual Report.]

What audacity do those advocates of the Society exhibit, who use, in reference to beings made a little lower than the angels, language like this--' disposing of our property in our own way we hold their slaves, as we hold their other property, SACRED!! * If they really mean and believe what they say, it is something more heinous than impertinence to urge the planters to dispossess themselves of their property by colonization; and if the slaves belong of right to them, are on a par with goods and chattels,-how idle, how supremely ridiculous it is to mourn over their wretched condition, to sigh for their emancipation, to declaim against the evil and wickedness of slavery, or even to denounce the slave trade! But the unfortunate blacks are not now, and never can be, the property of the planters; consequently the claims of their pretended owners are no better than those of the pirate or highway robber.

*Is there no difference between a vested interest in a house or a tenement, and a vested interest in a human being? No difference between a right to bricks and mortar, and a right to the flesh of man—a right to torture his body and to degrade his mind at your good will and pleasure? There is this difference,the right to the house originates in law, and is reconcilable to justice; the claim (for I will not call it a right) to the man, originated in robbery, and is an outrage upon every principle of justice, and every tenet of religion.'-Speech of Fowell Buxton in the British Parliament.

SECTION IV.

THE AMERICAN

COLONIZATION SOCIETY INCREASES THE

VALUE OF SLAVES.

I COME now to my fourth charge,-which, although not more serious or consequential than any of the foregoing, may possibly create more surprise,—namely, that the Society increases the value of slaves, and adds strength and security to the system of slavery. It is the discovery of this fact that is so wonderfully, and to many superficial observers so inexplicably, increasing the popularity of the Society at the south. It would require more pages of this work than its necessarily contracted limits permit, to sum up minutely the evidence on this point, and to give those illustrations which might serve more clearly to establish its validity. The most common, as it is the most potent, argument used by colonization agents among slave owners, to secure their patronage, is,— The successful prosecution of our scheme will remove the chief source of danger to yourselves, and enable you to hold your property in greater security the presence of free persons of color among your slaves is eminently calculated to make them insubordinate, and to procure their violent emancipation.' This argument, I say, is introduced into every conversation, and every public address, and every essay; and whoever carefully consults the numbers of the African Repository, through seven volumes, will find it repeated in almost every appeal to the south.

I choose to consider the testimony of southern men, in regard to the invigorating effects of the colonization enterprise upon the system of slavery, conclusive. Here is a very small portion of it: more may be found under the sixth section of this work.

The object of the Colonization Society commends itself to every class of society. The landed proprietor may ENHANCE THE VALUE OF HIS PROPERTY by assisting the enterprise.'—[African Repository, vol. i. p. 67.]

But is it not certain, that should the people of the Southern States refuse to adopt the opinions of the Colonization Society, [relative to the gradual abolition