dividual proprietor slave labor
is dearer than free, I do not mean to admit as equally clear that it is
dearer to the community and to the State. Though it is certain that the
slave is a far greater consumer than your laborer, the year round, yet
your pauper system is costly and wasteful. Supported by your community
at large, it is not administered by your hired agents with that
interested care and economy--not to speak of humanity--which mark the
management of ours, by each proprietor, for his own non-effectives; and
is both more expensive to those who pay, and less beneficial to those
who receive its bounties. Besides this, slavery is rapidly filling up
our country with a hardy and healthy race, peculiarly adapted to our
climate and productions, and conferring signal political and social
advantages on us as a people, to which I have already referred.

I have yet to reply to the main ground on which you and your coadjutors
rely for the overthrow of our system of slavery. Failing in all your
attempts to prove that it is sinful in its nature, immoral in its
effects, a political evil, and profitless to those who maintain it, you
appeal to the sympathies of mankind, and attempt to arouse the world
against us by the most shocking charges of tyranny and cruelty. You
begin by a vehement denunciation of "the irresponsible power of one man
over his fellow men." The question of the responsibility of power is a
vast one. It is the great political question of modern times. Whole
nations divide off upon it and establish different fundamental systems
of government. That "responsibility," which to one set of millions seems
amply sufficient to check the government, to the support of which they
devote their lives and fortunes, appears to another set of millions a
mere mockery of restraint. And accordingly as the opinions of these
millions differ, they honor each other with the epithets of "serfs" or
"anarchists." It is ridiculous to introduce such an idea as this into
the discussion of a mere domestic institution; but since you have
introduced it, I deny that the power of the slaveholder in America is
"irresponsible." He is responsible to God. He is responsible to the
world--a responsibility which abolitionists do not intend to allow him
to evade--and in acknowledgment of which, I write you this letter. He
is responsible to the community in which he lives, and to the laws under
which he enjoys his civil rights. Those laws do not permit