their masters; they
cannot be property; and he who denies them an opportunity to improve
their faculties, comes into collision with Jehovah, and incurs a fearful
responsibility. But we know that they are not treated like rational
beings, and that oppression almost entirely obliterates their sense of
moral obligation to God or man.

I fully coincide in opinion with the authoress of a work entitled,
'IMMEDIATE, NOT GRADUAL ABOLITION,' that the holder of a slave, whether
he obtained him by purchase or by inheritance, is as guilty as the
original thief.[K] The wretch who stole him could by no possible means
acquire or transmit the right to make a slave of him, or to keep him in
slavery. _He has a right to his liberty:_--through whatever number of
transfers the usurpation of it may have passed, the right is
undiminished.

No man, says Algernon Sidney, can have a right over others, unless it be
by them granted to him: That which is not just, is not law; and that
which is not law, ought not to be in force: Whosoever grounds his
pretensions of right upon usurpation and tyranny, declares himself to be
an usurper and a tyrant--that is, an enemy to God and man--and to have
no right at all: _That which was unjust in its beginning, can of itself
never change its nature:_ HE WHO PERSISTS IN DOING INJUSTICE, AGGRAVATES
IT, AND TAKES UPON HIMSELF ALL THE GUILT OF HIS PREDECESSORS: The right
to be free is a truth planted in the hearts of men, and acknowledged so
to be by all who have hearkened to the voice of nature, and disproved by
none but such as through wickedness, stupidity, or baseness of spirit,
seem to have degenerated into the worst of beasts, and to have retained
nothing of men but the outward shape, or the ability of doing those
mischiefs which they have learnt from their master the devil.

The following is the indignant, emphatic, eloquent language of HENRY
BROUGHAM, on the subject of slave property:

'_Tell me not of rights--talk not of the property of the planter
in his slaves._ I DENY THE RIGHT--I ACKNOWLEDGE NOT THE
PROPERTY. The principles, the feelings of our common nature,
rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal made to the
understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that
rejects it. In vain you tell me of the laws that sanction such a
claim! There is a law above all the enactments of human
codes--the same throughout the world, the same in all
times--such as i