|
WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE
FOR SLAVERY?
MOTIVES FOR ANTI-SLAVERY EFFORT
---------------
WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE
FOR SLAVERY?
Answer. 1. All slaveholders. 2. All
who justify or excuse slaveholding. 3. All who
make and who administer or execute the slave laws.
4. All legislators who do not wield their lawful powers
for the abolition of slavery. 5. all who vote for
such legislators, or for slaveholders. "He that ruleth
over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God."
6. All who do not bear testimony against slavery, and
conform their activities and their position to their
testimony. 7. All who maintain a pro-slavery
religion, or hold fellowship with it. 8. All who
do not put forth self-denying exertions for the
diffusion of anti-slavery sentiment, and the abolition
of slavery. 9. All who live under pro-slavery
constitutions, and do not demand their amendment.
MOTIVES FOR
ANTI-SLAVERY EFFOT.
1. Efforts for the abolition of slavery are
right.
2. They are in accordance with the will of God, who is
the God of righteousness, the refuge of the oppressed.
3. Not to plead the cause of godly character - to
fail of securing the Devine approbation and favour.
4. The cause of the oppressed is the cause of mercy and
humanity, as well as the cause of justice and the cause
of God.
5. Anti-slavery efforts are necessary for the
preservation of civil and religious liberty.
6. They are necessary for the moral reformation of the
community - for the suppression of lawlessness and vice,
for the promotion of industry, purity, and virtue.
7. They are necessary for the purification of the
churches, for the honour of Christianity, for the
revival
Page 2 -
of pure and undefiled religion. They are necessary
for the evangelizing of the heathen at home, and for the
propagation of a pure and liberty-loving religion among
the heathen abroad.
8. They form an essential link in the chain of connected
efforts for the progressive enlightenment, civilization,
elevation, and restored brotherhood of the family of
man.
9. Anti-slavery efforts are necessary to the restored
idea and correct apprehension not only of the rights of
humanity, but of the rights of property, of the true
relation between labour and wages, between capital and
labour.
10. They are therefore necessary to a perfected science
of domestic industry, of political economy, of
commercial intercourse, a proper and healthful
development of man, and of the elements and the
riches of nature, created for man's benefit. We
say not that mere anti-slavery efforts are
sufficient to accomplish any one or all of these
objects. We do say that they are essentially
necessary to those ends, nevertheless.
There are questions affecting the highest interests of
Man, on which it is criminal to be silent. We
cannot plead ignorance as an excuse either for silence
or inability in the anti-slavery cause. When we
remember tht there are now in the world upwards of SEVEN
MILLIONS of human beings detained in slavery; who
are held as goods and chattels, the property of other
human beings having similar passions with themselves;
that they are liable to be sold and transferred from
hand to hand like the beasts that perish; that more than
400,000 are annually torn from the land of their birth,
and sent into distant region; and this not in families,
the nearest connections of life being frequently torn
asunder; and when we further reflect, that in several,
if not in most of the slaveholding states, the slaves
are systematically excluded from all means of improving
their minds - that in some, even teaching them to read
is treated as a crime. I say, when we know
and remember all this, does not the question naturally
arise in every bosom, "Can I be an innocent, and
yet a silent spectator of this mighty
infringement of every human and sacred right?"
Leeds Anti-slavery
Series. No. 81.
Sold by W. and F. G. CASH, 5,
Bishopsgate Street, London; and by JANE JOWETT, Friends'
Meeting Yard, Leeds, at 1s. 2. per 100.
|
