pressive control over another! Where would such a detestable
principle lead but to practices the most atrocious, and results the most
disastrous, if carried out among ourselves? Tell us, ye hair-splitting
sophists, the exact quantum of knowledge which is necessary to
constitute a freeman. If every dunce should be a slave, your servitude
is inevitable; and richly do you deserve the lash for your obtuseness.
Our white population, too, would furnish blockheads enough to satisfy
all the classical kidnappers in the land.

The reason why the slaves are so ignorant, is because they are held in
bondage; and the reason why they are held in bondage, is because they
are so ignorant! They ought not to be freed until they are educated; and
they ought not be educated, because on the acquisition of knowledge they
would burst their fetters! Fine logic, indeed! How men, who make any
pretensions to honesty or common sense, can advance a paradox like this,
is truly inexplicable. 'I never met with a man yet,' says an able writer
in Kentucky, 'who impliedly admits the enslaving of human beings as
consistent with the exercise of christian duties, who could talk or
write ten minutes on the subject, without expressing nonsense, or
contradicting himself, or advancing heresy which would expose him to
censure on any other subject.' In this connexion, I make the following
extract from the Report of the _Dublin Negro's Friend Society_, of which
WILBERFORCE is President, and CLARKSON Vice President:

'They do not recognize the false principle, that education, as a
preparation for freedom, must precede emancipation; or that an
amelioration of the slaves' condition should be a substitute for
it: on the contrary, THEY INSIST UPON UNPROCRASTINATED
EMANCIPATION, as a right which is unrighteously withheld, and
the restoration of which is, in their opinion, the first and
most indispensable step to all improvement, and absolutely
essential to the application of the only remedy for that moral
debasement, in which slavery has sunk its victims.'

I cannot portray the absurdity of the doctrine of gradual abolition, and
the danger and folly of attempting to mitigate the system of slavery,
more strikingly, than by presenting the following eloquent extracts from
a speech of the Rev. Dr. Thomson of Edinburgh, one of the most learned
and able divines in Great Britain, whose sudden death was recorded in
the newspapers a few month