nd_ INDEPENDENCE FOREVER!

(_There is a loud clamor for recognition, and the president
recognizes George Walton of Georgia._)

GEORGE WALTON. [13]Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Continental
Congress:--I am for this Declaration if the paragraph on slavery is
struck out. But I will oppose it to the end if that paragraph is
permitted to remain a part of it. There is not one good reason for
introducing the slavery question at this time. The relations between
individual master and slave have no place here in the greater and graver
matter of differences between the British Government and the American
Colonies. But since the issue is thrust upon us, I propose to meet it
squarely and fearlessly.

Mr. President and gentlemen, you cannot make equal what God Almighty has
made unequal. Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his
spots? The Bible commands in the most emphatic language that servants
obey in all things their masters. Liberty loving Greece had her slaves.
Shall liberty loving America have less? Strike out that obnoxious
paragraph and every delegate from the Southern colonies will fall in
line for the Declaration of Independence, but if you make that paragraph
a part of the Declaration many delegates from the South will withdraw
from this convention, and then you will fight your own battles.

This paragraph on slavery is founded upon ideas fundamentally wrong.
These ideas rest upon the assumption of the equality of the races. This
is an error. It is a sandy foundation and a government founded upon it
will fall when the storms come and the winds blow.

Let us found our new government upon the great truth that the negro is
not the equal of the white man, that slavery--subordination to the
superior race--is his natural and normal condition. This truth has been
slow in the process of its development, like all other great truths in
the various departments of science.

Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the
subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the _same_ race; such
were and are in violation of the laws of nature. With us, _all_ the
_white_ race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of
the law. Not so with the negro; subordination is his place. He, by
nature or by the curse of Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he
now occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of a
building, lays the foundation with proper material--the gran