Yet the atrocities of this law are defended by those who made it, on the ground that they and other white men have secured benefits to themselves by sacrificing the liberty, happiness and peace of half a million of their fellow-beings of a different color.
This passage critiques the justifications made by those who defend the Fugitive Slave Law despite its moral atrocities.
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Yet, by denying education to the slave, you destroy not merely the right, but the power, of personal examination in regard to all that most nearly concerns the soul’s interests.
So far as legal rights against his oppressors are concerned, the slave lives in such a world of darkness.
Cast it off, West Virginians, whilst yet you have the power; for if you let it descend unbroken to your children, it will have grown to a mountain of misery upon their heads.
Mere knowledge, without the moral sense, can take no cognizance of the everlasting distinctions between right and wrong; and so the blind instinct, unguided by knowledge, will be forever at fault in its conclusions.
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