But now, for the first time in the world’s annals, a people professing civilization has commenced war to uphold the intolerable pretension of compulsory labor without wages, and that most disgusting coïncident, the whipping of women and the selling of children.
In this statement, Sumner condemns the moral atrocities of slavery, particularly the violence and exploitation associated with it.
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It is a cause which, though long kept in check throughout our country, as also in Europe, now confronts the people and their rulers, demanding to be heard.
But so long as War exists as an Institution this terrible inconsistency must appear.
It is larger than the entire profit of all the commerce and manufactures of the world.
Again I repeat, so long as the War System prevails under the sanction of International Law, these painful incongruities will be apparent.
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