This result we do not feel like
favoring, and we are under no legal obligation to suppress our feelings
in this respect.
Equal justice to the South, it is said, requires us to consent to the
extension of slavery to new countries. That is to say, inasmuch as you do
not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object
to your taking your slave. Now, I admit that this is perfectly logical if
there is no difference between hogs and negroes. But while you thus
require me to deny the humanity of the negro, I wish to ask whether you
of the South, yourselves, have ever been willing to do as much? It is
kindly provided that of all those who come into the world only a small
percentage are natural tyrants. That percentage is no larger in the slave
States than in the free. The great majority South, as well as North, have
human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they
can of their sensibility to physical pain. These sympathies in the bosoms
of the Southern people manifest, in many ways, their sense of the wrong
of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in
the negro. If they deny this, let me address them a few plain questions.
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