ts of which, are colonies of
Swiss, of Spaniards, and of Catholic French. The Irishmen is
everywhere; and everywhere better treated than at home. Amongst such a
people, it must needs be an instinctive sentiment, that he who loves
country more than liberty, is unworthy to have either; that he who
inculcates or affects the love of place above the possession of
precious privileges, must have a sinister object. But he might proceed
much farther; and having shown that it might be the duty of men to
emigrate under various circumstances, prove that such a duty never was
more imperative than on the free colored population of America.
Possessing few motives to remain in America that were not base or
insignificant compared with those that ought to urge their return,
every attempt to explain and defend their conduct revealed a
selfishness on their part a thousand times greater than that they
charge upon the whites; and a cruelty on the part of their advisers
towards the dying millions of heathen in Africa, more atrocious than
that charged, even by them, on the master against his slave. The love
of country, of kindred, of liberty, of the souls of men, and of God
himself, impels them to depart, and do a work which none but they can
do; and which they forego through the love of ease, the lack of
energy, vanity gratified by the caresses of abolitionists, and
deadness to the great motives detailed above. But there was another,
and most obvious truth, which shows the utter futility of the
principle of abolition now contested. So far was the fact from being
so, that anybody, black or white, held an inherent right of
citizenship in the place of his birth; that it is most certain, no man
had even a right of bare residence, which the state might not justly
and properly deprive him of--upon sufficient reason. The state has the
indisputable right to coerce emigration, whenever the public good
required it; and when that public good coincided with the interest of
the emigrating party--and that also of the land to which they went--to
coerce such emigration might become a most sacred duty. It was indeed
true, that the friends of colonization had not contemplated nor
proposed any other than a purely voluntary emigration; for even the
traduced State of Maryland not only made the fact of removal
voluntary, but, going a step further than any other, gave a choice of
place to the emigrant. I recommend Africa, says she, but I will aid
you to go wherever