latures; and they
choose none but such as agree with them in opinion. It matters not,
therefore, what public sentiment may be at the North, as it has no power
over the Legislatures of the South. Here, then, is the difference: with
us the slaveholder controls the question of emancipation, while in
England the consent of the master was not necessary to the execution of
that work.

Our anti-slavery men seem to have fallen into their errors of policy, by
following the lead of those of England, who manifested a total ignorance
of the relations existing between our General Government and the State
Governments. On the abolition platform, slaveholders found themselves
placed in the same category with slave traders and thieves. They were
told that all laws, giving them power over the slave, were void in the
sight of heaven; and that their appropriation of the fruits of the labor
of the slave, without giving him compensation, was robbery. Had the
preaching of these principles produced conviction, it must have promoted
emancipation. But, unfortunately, while these doctrines were held up to
the gaze of slaveholders, in the one hand of the exhorter, they beheld
his other hand stretched out, from beneath his cloak of seeming
sanctity, to clutch the products of the very robbery he was professing
to condemn! Take a fact in proof of this view of the subject.

At the date of the declarations of Daniel O'Connell, on behalf of the
English, and by the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Convention, on the part of
Americans, the British manufacturers were purchasing, annually, about
300,000,000 lbs. of cotton, from the very men denounced as equally
criminal with slave traders and thieves; and the people of the United
States were almost wholly dependent upon slave labor for their supplies
of cotton and groceries. It is no matter for wonder, therefore, that
slaveholders, should treat, as fiction, the doctrine that slave labor
products are the fruits of robbery, so long as they are purchased
without scruple, by all classes of men, in Europe and America. The
pecuniary argument for emancipation, that free labor is more profitable
than slave labor, was also urged here, but was treated as the greatest
absurdity. The masters had, before their eyes, the evidence of the
falsity of the assertion, that, if emancipated, the slaves would be
doubly profitable as free laborers. The reverse was admitted, on all
hands, to be true in relation to our colored people.