Political Quotes

Horace Mann: “And the argument, that if a man be wrongfully consigned to bondage he may be afterwards restored to freedom, is as…”

On the record
And the argument, that if a man be wrongfully consigned to bondage he may be afterwards restored to freedom, is as audacious and as tyrannical as to say that an innocent man may be hanged and sent into another world as a felon, because sometimes the dead have been restored to life.
Said by
Horace Mann
Free Soil · Massachusetts

Editor's note · Context

Mann critiques the argument that wrongful enslavement can be rectified later, equating it to the wrongful execution of an innocent person.

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My instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, may all mislead; but from the first time, now years ago, when I heard this subject broached, my instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, have all been in its favor.

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But such largesses to slavery as kings could not afford to give, and the robbery of an entire race of all its rights,--yes, and with authority, too, to make us help commit the robbery,--these are “factitious and imaginary” causes of…

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I answer, that this difference which they so be-little and disparage will often be all the difference between freedom and bondage, between life and death, between honor and infamy, between happiness and perdition.

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