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Simply to the fact that no nation can long unsay its central principle, and yet preserve it in faithfulness and power, that no nation can long preach the sanctity of natural right, the venerableness of man's nature, and the identity of pure justice with political interest, from an auction-block on which men and maidens are sold, that, in fine, a nation cannot continue long with impunity to play within its own borders the part both of Gessler and Tell, both of Washington and Benedict Arnold, both of Christ and of him that betrayed him.
If he who makes two blades of grass grow where only one flourished before is a benefactor of the human race, how much higher and holier must his or her work be who dispenses light, instead of darkness, knowledge, instead of ignorance, and over the ruins of the slave-pen and auction-block erects institutions of learning.
Even when with a good master, there is no certainty of his happiness in the future. The less valuable slaves were first placed upon the auction-block, one after another, and sold to the highest bidder. Husbands and wives were separated with a degree of indifference that is unknown in any other relation in life.
Has she not heard that the Supreme Court of the United States has absolved her from all her feelings of humanity? "The parting!" Where has she lived not to know how, according to our lecturers, families are parted at the auction-block in the Southern States without the least compunction?
But oh, we say at the North, only to think, that all those fine-looking people whom Hattie saw from the barouche, that Monday afternoon, were liable on Tuesday morning to have their kid gloves and finery taken from them, and to be marched off to the auction-block! Hence our commiseration. And it is a most groundless commiseration. One thing is especially impressed on my mind.
Louis to pass by an auction-stand, and behold a woman upon the auction-block, and hear the seller crying out, "How much is offered for this woman? She is a good cook, good washer, a good obedient servant. She has got religion!" Why should this man tell the purchasers that she has religion?
Instead of slaves we see men and women and children. The wand of progress touches the auction-block, the slave-pen, the whipping-post, and we see homes and firesides and school-houses and books, and where all was want, and crime and cruelty, and fear we see the faces of the free. These heroes are dead. They died for liberty they died for us. They are at rest.
He vituperates the poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a Mississippi slave-driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on the banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave-pen and auction-block, vulgar, unmanly, indecent, a scandalous outrage upon good taste and refined feeling, which at once degrades the author and insults his readers.
Their little State was divided into twenty-six provinces or counties, ruled by hereditary lords. The King was simply the most important one of these. Here were institutions which would have deserved the epithet patriarchal, save for the absence of overseers and the auction-block. The men worked in the field, the women spun at home.
Our modern science and our Christian civilization are alike challenged by this condition of things. Yet, as you think of the horror of these Boston "cabins" and their miserable tenants, you will say, "They are at least free, they cannot be bought and sold like Uncle Tom." Alas! they are not free. True, no one can take them to an auction-block, but their bondage is none the less real.
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