These are high charges, but I appeal
to _their hearts_; I appeal to public opinion ten years from now.
Slavery then is a national sin.
But you will say, a great many other Northerners tell us so, who can
have no political motives. The interests of the North, you must know, my
friends, are very closely combined with those of the South. The Northern
merchants and manufacturers are making _their_ fortunes out of the
_produce of slave labor_; the grocer is selling your rice and sugar; how
then can these men bear a testimony against slavery without condemning
themselves? But there is another reason, the North is most dreadfully
afraid of Amalgamation. She is alarmed at the very idea of a thing so
monstrous, as she thinks. And lest this consequence _might_ flow from
emancipation, she is determined to resist all efforts at emancipation
without expatriation. It is not because she _approves of slavery_, or
believes it to be "the corner stone of our republic," for she is as much
_anti-slavery_ as we are; but amalgamation is too horrible to think of.
Now I would ask _you_, is it right, is it generous, to refuse the
colored people in this country the advantages of education and the
privilege, or rather the _right_, to follow honest trades and callings
merely because they are colored? The same prejudice exists here against
our colored brethren that existed against the Gentiles in Judea.
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