guishable from ordinary Christians,
except, perhaps, by a simpler and more earnest faith. There are people
at the North who believe, that, beside _meum_ and _tuum_, there is
also such a thing as _suum_,--who are old-fashioned enough, or weak
enough, to have their feelings touched by these things, to think that
human nature is older and more sacred than any claim of property
whatever, and that it has rights at least as much to be respected as
any hypothetical one of our Southern brethren. This, no doubt, makes
it harder to recover a fugitive chattel; but the existence of human
nature in a man here and there is surely one of those accidents to be
counted on at least as often as fire, shipwreck, or the
cattle-disease; and the man who chooses to put his money into these
images of his Maker cut in ebony should be content to take the
incident risks along with the advantages. We should be very sorry to
deem this risk capable of diminution; for we think that the claims of
a common manhood upon us should be at least as strong as those of
Freemasonry, and that those whom the law of man turns away should find
in the larger charity of the law of God and Nature a readier welcome
and surer sanctuary. We shall continue to think the negro a man, and
on Southern evidence, too, as long as he is counted in the population
represented on the floor of Congress,--for three-fifths of perfect
manhood would be a high average even among white men; as long as he is
hanged or worse, as an example and terror to others,--for we do not
punish one animal for the moral improvement of the rest; as long as he
is considered capable of religious instruction,--for we fancy the
gorillas would make short work with a missionary; as long as there are
fears of insurrection,--for we never heard of a combined effort at
revolt in a menagerie. Accordingly, we do not see how the particular
right of whose infringement we hear so much is to be made safer by the
election of Mr. Bell, Mr. Breckinridge, or Mr. Douglas,--there being
quite as little chance that any of them would abolish human nature as
that Mr. Lincoln would abolish slavery. The same generous instinct
that leads some among us to sympathize with the sorrows of the
bereaved master will always, we fear, influence others to take part
with the rescued man.

But if our Constitutional Obligations, as we like to call our
constitutional timidity or indifference, teach us that a particular
divinity hedges the Domesti