Hear this, fellow-citizens, and confess that no barbarity of despotism, no extravagance of tyranny, no excess of impiety can be more blasphemous or deadly.

Train up a child in the way he should go” is the lesson of Divine Wisdom; but the Law of Slavery boldly prohibits any such training, and dooms the child to hopeless ignorance and degradation.

Let there be light” was the Divine behest at the dawn of Creation,--and this commandment, travelling with the ages and the hours, still speaks with the voice of God; yet the Law of Slavery says, “Let there be darkness.

The masses of men are not better than their laws, and, whatever may be the eminence of individual virtue, it is not reasonable to infer that the body of slave-masters is better than the Law of Slavery.

And this conclusion must exist unquestioned, just so long as the law exists unrepealed.

Cease, then, to blazon the humanity of slave-masters.

Tell me not of the lenity with which this cruel law is tempered to its unhappy subjects.

Tell me not of the sympathy which overflows from the mansion of the master to the cabin of the slave.

Slavery, which it defines and upholds, continues to outrage Public Opinion, and, within the limits of our Republic, more than three millions of human beings, guilty only of a skin not colored like your own, are left the victims of its…

Power divorced from right is devilish; power without the check of responsibility is tyrannical; and I need not go back to the authority of Plato, when I assert that the most complete injustice is that erected into the form of law.

It is, then, on the testimony of slave-masters, solemnly, legislatively, judicially attested in the very law itself, that I now arraign this institution as an outrage upon man and his Creator.

A wrong so transcendent, so loathsome, so direful, must be encountered, wherever it can be reached; and the battle must be continued without truce or compromise, until the field is entirely won.

Freedom and Slavery can hold no divided empire; nor can there be any true repose, until Freedom is everywhere established.

That is all; and I need only read these words in order to expose the whole--transpicuous humbug.

It may be that the different races of men proceeded from different stocks; but there is but one great Human Family, in which Caucasian and African, Chinese and Indian, are all brothers, children of one Father, and heirs to one…

But by no reach of learning, no torture of fact, no effrontery of dogma, can any science show that he is not a man.

And as a man he stands before you an unquestionable member of the Human Family, entitled to all the rights of man.

You can claim nothing for yourself, as man, which you must not accord to him.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which you proudly declare to be your own inalienable, God-given rights, and to the support of which your fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, are his by the same immortal…

If to any one these things seem to have the license of Christianity, it is only because they have first secured a license in his own soul.

And I--who am no theologian, but only a simple layman--make bold to say, that whoever finds in the Gospel any sanction of Slavery finds there merely a reflection of himself.

With regret, though not with astonishment, I learn that a Boston divine has sought to throw the seamless garment of Christ over this shocking wrong.

In support of Slavery, it is the habit to pervert texts and to invent authority.

Certainly I am right in stripping from Slavery the apology of Christianity, which it has tenaciously hugged; and here I leave the first part of my subject, asserting, against every objection, the Necessity of our Enterprise.

Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.