are more remote. Yet that principle was, to say
the least, extremely doubtful, and ought not at every hazard to be
crammed down the throats of an entire nation. If the laws of the
community were bad, as he admitted it to be the case, he supposed it
was the duty of enlightened citizens to seek a change of that law by
proper means, but not in the meantime to do that which would be
totally insubordinate to the State--and injurious to all parties.
Whether, moreover, it was either fair or candid to denounce, as had
been done, the free States as being participators in slavery, because,
though they did not themselves hold a property in slaves, they did not
choose to swallow such nostrums even without chewing, could not be a
question. If it was so doubtful whether duty to the slaves themselves
rendered the immediate breaking up of all relations between them and
their masters a proper or even a permitted thing, it was still more
questionable whether our duties to the State may not imperiously
forbid what our duties to the slave have already warned us against. I
have omitted all considerations of a personal or selfish kind--all
rules of conduct drawn from what is due to one's self, one's family,
or one's condition, or engagements. Common benevolence forbids, as we
have seen, and common loyalty prohibits, as we shall see--what a man
must do, or lie under the curse of abolitionism. For though it be our
duty to seek the amendment of bad laws, because they are bad, it is
equally our duty to obey laws because they are laws, unless it is
clear that greater ill will follow from obedience than from
disobedience. Now all our slave States are perfectly willing that
their citizens should emancipate their slaves; only many of them
insist on their doing it elsewhere, than within their borders. As long
as other lands exist, ready to receive the manumitted slave, and
certain to be benefitted by his reception, it is to preach treason, as
well as cruelty, and folly as well as either, to assert the bounden
duty of the individual slave-holder, at all hazards, to attempt an
impossibility on the instant, rather than accomplish a better result
by foresight, preparation, and suitable delay. It may therefore be
boldly said that instant surrender of the authority of the master,
irrespective of all other considerations, must, in many cases, be a
great crime in the individual slave-holder. He would now speak of this
abolition principle to which he had adver