of us, at a moment's notice, and dragging us off into perpetual
bondage. It is _something_ gained to require legal proof that a man
is a slave, before he is given up to arbitrary torture and
unrecompensed toil. But is _that_ the measure of justice becoming
the character of a free Commonwealth? "_Prove_ that the man is
property, according _your_ laws, and I will drive him into your
cattle-pen with sword and bayonet," is what Massachusetts
practically says to Southern tyrants. "Show me a Bill of Sale from
the Almighty!" is what she _ought_ to say. No other proof should be
considered valid in a Christian country.

One thousand five hundred years ago, Gregory, a Bishop in Asia
Minor, preached a sermon in which he rebuked the sin of
slaveholding. Indignantly he asked, "Who can be the possessor of
human beings save God? Those men that you say belong to you, did not
God create them free? Command the brute creation; that is well. Bend
the beasts of the field beneath your yoke. But are your fellow-men
to be bought and sold, like herds of cattle? Who can pay the value
of a being created in the image of God? The whole world itself bears
no proportion to the value of a soul, on which the Most High has set
the seal his likeness. This world will perish, but the soul of man
is immortal. Show me, then, your titles of possession. Tell me
whence you derive this strange claim. Is not your own nature the
same with that of those you call your slaves? Have they not the same
origin with yourselves? Are they not born to the same immortal
destinies?"

Thus spake a good old Bishop, in the early years of Christianity.
Since then, thousands and thousands of noble souls have given their
bodies to the gibbet and the stake, to help onward the slow progress
of truth and freedom; a great unknown continent has been opened as a
new, free starting point for the human race; printing has been
invented, and the command, "Whatsoever ye would that men should do
unto you, do ye even so unto them," has been sent abroad in all the
languages of the earth. And here, in the noon-day light the
nineteenth century, in a nation claiming to be the freest and most
enlightened on the face of the globe, a portion the population of
fifteen States have thus agreed among themselves: "Other men shall
work for us, without wages while we smoke, and drink, and gamble,
and race horses, and fight. We will have their wives and daughters
for concubines, and sell their children in t