grows harder and harder, and his means of subsistence fail, he robs both wife and children of their sustenance, of their very clothing, in order to purchase indulgence for his beastly appetite; thus living, as it is just to say, on the blood. of his offspring, and drinking the tears of that broken-hearted woman who is, perhaps, obliged to wander a mourner, from door to door, to beg for bread!

common

Thus do we see the very fountain and source of industry, of frugality, of wealth, dried up and destroyed.

You may give a man the bodily powers of a giant, and the intellectual energies of a demi-god, but if his social and moral nature be debased by intemperance, the gift is utterly valueless. A community of such men, would, in a single generation, become a race of savages, as destitute of any thing deserving the name of national wealth, as of national respectability.

We will now dwell for a few moments on one other principle in the science of political economy, and then dismiss the subject.

Writers on political economy, speak of something which they call useless expenditure, or unprofitable consumption; which, though it be not very accurately defined, is universally described as so much absolute loss. Thus if I purchase a hundred dollars' worth of gunpowder, and explode it merely for my own amusement, this is useless expenditure and unprofitable consumption. In general terms, it may be said that whatever is consumed without the accomplishment of any useful purpose, without yielding any return, is in fact so much wasted and thrown away.

All have heard of the foolish profusion practised at the court of the Egyptian Cleopatra, when pearls of royal price were dissolved and drank in goblets of wine. Every person is ready to pronounce such an act a ridiculous waste of wealth. But how many have ever reflected that habits of intemperance occasion a waste of property, of strength, of intellect, of character, far more prodigal and far more hurtful to individuals, and to the whole fabric of society! Such is, however, the real fact!

We have shown that the use of ardent spirit as a drink is never productive of benefit. The money paid for it is, therefore, thrown away! We have shown that the use of it is not merely of no benefit, but an enormous injury, in an economical point of view, to body, mind, and heart. The

waste which it occasions, is, therefore, by no means circumscribed by the price of the drink.

If the intemperance of the United States was an injury to national wealth only to the extent of the money expended for alcoholic drinks, it would nevertheless amount to the prodigious sum of $50,000,000 every year!

But in addition to this immense expenditure of gold and silver, let us estimate the waste of time; the diminished productiveness of land, of labor, and of capital; the loss of strength, of health, of intellect, of good habits; the cost of the paupers and of the crimes which intemperance occasions; the accidental losses attributable to the same cause; and the vast shortening of human life; and the whole sum of absolute waste rises above the startling amount of $100,000,000 per annum ; a sum more than seven times as large as that paid by the United States to France for the whole of that immense territory which stretches westward from the river Mississippi to the Pacific ocean.

And this enormous expenditure is every year incurred by a people who boast that their national trait is frugality! a people who pretend to be the most moral upon earth! a people who rebelled against their parent country and endured all the horrors of the revolution rather than pay a few thousand pounds in taxation! a people comparatively poor in monied capital, who depend almost wholly upon labor for subsistence, and who are surrounded by countless modes of employing their capital in profitable investments! Truly we are a prudent, a frugal, a moral, a consistent, a virtuous people.

ARTICLE II.

THE TRUE PRINCIPLE OF SLAVERY, TOGETHER WITH THE PRESENT ATTITUDE AND RELATIONS OF THE SUBJECT TO THE PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY.

THAT public opinion has been advancing, for years past, towards the extinction of slavery, no sane and observant man can doubt. This crying iniquity has aroused the

thoughtful and conscientious of all parties, to a pungent feeling of their responsibility in relation to it, and to an earnest solicitude for its extermination. All serious and candid thinkers on the subject, are ready to maintain, that the brutal degradation, the wanton disfranchisement of manhood, and of the rights and duties of manhood, which have prevalence under the name of slavery within our territory, ought, if not immediately, yet ultimately and utterly, to be abolished. Nor have they been content with mere convictions, hopes or schemes. Their belief has not been speculative merely, but practical and in earnest, and they have put heart and hand to the work. They have striven for the extinction of slavery in the only practicable mode of accomplishing it, by harrowing up that incrustation of guilty ignorance which had obscured and belittled its enormity to ordinary view, and making men's souls thrill and vibrate with quick and hearty yearnings towards the oppressed.

It may seem a work of supererogation then, to attempt a definition of slavery, or a demonstration of its wrongfulness. But it is to be remembered, that many, very many, even in the northern States, are not thoughtful and conscientious in this matter,, who need and ought to be persuaded to become so. Besides, a wide and irreconcileable discrepancy prevails among those who entertain a common abhorrence of the crime of acquiring and holding slaves, as to the specific direction and form of our assaults on the monster. Disputes are prosecuted with zeal, and not seldom with fury, about the sinfulness and innocence of countless relations and attitudes of the master towards the slave, which no force of argument or eloquence can lay to rest. It is to be presumed, that these differences spring from a want of clear and full insight, not of the wrongfulness of slavery, but of the manner and grounds of the wrong. All men feel and know the wickedness of slavery, by an intuition above and antecedent to argument, which impels them to construct arguments and search for reasons against it. By those direct and immediate revelations of conscience to which no man can be a stranger, and which become known and felt as soon as the reflective powers are sufficiently mature to take cognizance of the circumstances to which they apply, and prior to all calculation of consequences, men must be made conscious of their duties, nor can they be blind to them without a wilful and guilty disposition to evade the light, because their

deeds are evil. In this way slavery meets the instantaneous and decided reprobation of every undegraded human spirit. Even those, who in theory make shipwreck of morality on the quicksands of expediency, and yet retain any practical idea of justice, are impelled by a sense of the wickedness of slavery in the form of a spontaneous abhorrence of it, which is opened up to them in the revelations of conscience, to strive to account for the detestation of it, by a superficial effort to imagine, that they have calculated its injurious tendencies on the wealth, happiness, or morals of society. As if these in their turn did not require to be estimated in the same balance, and so on ad infinitum. Or, as if they were willing to confess, that they could look with complacent satisfaction on thousands of their innocent fellow-beings subjected to the chain, the rack, the scourge, and the hammer, in short, encompassed with all the evils and sufferings of brutes and irresponsible things, because the wealth and prosperity of society would be thereby promoted! Here then, as in all things, we see how just practical principles may become perverted, and bereft of much of their soundness and benignant energy, by being compounded and confused with false theories in regard to them. If we pierce at all beyond the surface of a practical maxim, and attempt to account to ourselves for its why and wherefore, it is perilous not to see our way clearly, before making our "adventurous flights" into this terra incognita. Thus it is in religion, the prime source and feeder of all our duties. Few, comparatively, doubt their own sinfulness and need of salvation. But their speculations into its causes, grounds and modes, have greatly vitiated the native and genuine power of this belief, and more than half of Christendom has been verging towards infidelity, in running astray from the true God after their own sensual and gross superstitions, sometimes in the form of idolatry to the deified laws of nature, sometimes in the opposite form of a malignant awe of a worm of the dust, claiming their homage, in equal violation of the laws of nature and God. Ought such abominations then to disparage religion? No; the counterfeit is proof of the genuine coin. Ought they to discourage us from looking into the grounds and principles of our actions and rules of action? They should stimulate us to the work. They show that men do, and in the natural, healthful activity of their being, will, have questionings, and satisfying

answers in respect to how, what, and why they are. Nor can we meet or put to rest wrong surmises, or disenchant men of their flattering and soul-palsying delusions, by any other than the magic wand of truth. Would we save them from being stranded on the shoals of error, we must rectify their deviations by the pole-star of truth. We must neutralize false reasonings by true ones.

The origin of the diversity of opinions concerning our obligations to the slaves, and concerning what constitutes an adequate fulfilment of them, is traceable to vague and misconceived notions of its real definition and essence. Hence the duties growing out of the long tolerated continuance of the sin, set themselves before us in shapes and phases distorted through the medium of a wrong apprehension of the enormity to which they relate. While radically it is the same principle of doing justice and loving mercy, that gives birth to every form of interest and labor for the emancipation and amelioration of the slave, yet, two organizations have been formed for these ends, some of whose members are accustomed to style their opponents jacobins, on the one side, and to be styled oppressors, or conspirators with oppressors on the other. The one class are against all parleying and treating slavery as a sort of established and stationary sin, to endure till circumstances shall make it convenient to get rid of it. They are for denouncing it outright, with a condemnation not qualified or softened by any expressions of sympathy with the slave-holder, because habit has hardened and emboldened him in crime, and now that his property is involved in it, he is loth to attack his own interest. Thus refusing all compromise, they demand immediate and absolute emancipation, and condemn all slower and more cautious methods as incommensurate with the fearfulness of the sin, and of course unlikely to eradicate it. The latter and larger class maintain, that violent remedies will only aggravate the disease, and, that the convulsions attendant on exorcising one demon, will be like restoring seven. They think that action demonstrates a more efficient hatred than words; and that if we keep busy in lopping off some of the blossoming evils of slavery, without laying the axe directly at its root, this sphere of activity will be a safe and inoffensive arena for directing and exposing the entire matter to the inspection of the country, and that "slavery cannot survive discussion." It is fit that we observe here, how adverse to jacobinism and