the religious sects of America, with but few exceptions, are connected with the sin of slavery—the churches North as well as South. We would have you tell the professed Christians of that land, that if they would be respected by you, they must separate themselves from the unholy alliance with men who are daily committing deeds which, if done in England, would cause the perpetrator to be sent to a felon's doom; that they must refuse the right hand of Christian fellowship, whether individually or collectively, to those implicated, in any way, in the guilt of slavery.
We do not ask for a forcible interference on your part, but only that you will use all lawful and peaceful means to restore to this much injured race their God-given rights. The moral and religious sentiment of mankind must be arrayed against slave-holding, to make it infamous, ere we can hope to see it abolished. We would ask you to set them the example, by excluding from your pulpits, and from religious communion, the slave-holding and pro-slavery ministers who may happen to visit this country. We would even go further, and ask you to shut your doors
against either ministers or laymen, who are at all guilty of upholding and sustaining this monster sin. By the cries of the slave, which come from the fields and swamps of the far South, we ask you to do this! By that spirit of liberty and equality of which you all admire, we would ask you to do this. And by that still nobler, higher, and holier spirit of our beloved Saviour, we would ask you to stamp upon the head of the slaveholder, with a brand deeper than that which marks the victim of his wrongs, the infamy of theft, adultery, man-stealing, piracy, and murder, and, by the force of public opinion, compel him to "unloose the heavy burden, and let the oppressed go free."
LETTER XXI.
A Chapter on American Slavery.
The word Englishman is but another name for an American, and the word American is but an
other name for an Englishman—England is the father, America the son. They have a common origin and identity of language; they hold the same religious and political opinions; they study the same histories, and have the same literature. Steam and mechanical ingenuity have brought the two countries within nine days sailing of each other. The Englishman on landing at New-York finds his new neighbours speaking the same language which he last heard on leaving Liverpool, and he sees the American in the same dress that he had been accustomed to look upon at home, and soon forgets that he is three thousand miles from his native land, and in another country. The American on landing at Liverpool, and taking a walk through the great commercial city, finding no difficulty in understanding the people, supposes himself still in New-York; and if there seems any doubt in his own mind, growing out of the fact that the people have a more healthy look, seem more polite, and that the buildings have a more substantial appearance than those he had formerly looked upon, he has only to imagine, as did Rip Van
Winkle, that he has been asleep these hundred years.
If the Englishman who has seen a Thompson silenced in Boston, or a Macready mobbed in New-York, upon the ground that they were foreigners, should sit in Exeter Hall and hear an American orator until he was hoarse, and wonder why the American is better treated in England than the Englishman in America, he has only to attribute it to John Bull's superior knowledge of good manners, and his being a more law-abiding man than brother Jonathan. England and America has each its reforms and its reformers, and they have more or less sympathy with each other. It has been said that one generation commences a reform in England, and that another generation finishes it. I would that so much could be said with regard to the great object of reform in America—the system of slavery!