comes and claims of me the little I have got, I
will give it up to him. [Laughter]
Now, I say, take your genera] principle,
that no property, general or special, can ever
be acquired in a stolen thing. Take the his-
tory of your slave trade. Mr. Pinckney, a
few sentences later, says that the negro comes
here as free as the air yon breathe, and you
have no right to rob him of his freedom; nor
have you any right to purchase his freedom of
any party who has robbed him of it. Of
course my friend will say: Why, there is the
act of 1715, and some later acts, even worse
than that.
Now, I ask, what really constitutes law?
What is law? Is it a simple edict? Is it a
mere statute? Does that constitute law? Is
that the definition of law which your text
books and commentators taught you? No,
sir. Law is a rule founded in reason, justice
and right. And any statute, any edict, that
professes to be law, and is not founded in
reason, and justice, and right, is not law.
Gentlemen may say that their title to this
property was secured by the act of 1715.
Who passed that act? The very parties who
had bought the title of the slave-trader. The
slave-stealer came into this hall, and tried to
heal his title by the act of 1715. Did it heal
it? Because, mark you, the answer to that
question depends upon the fact whether that
statute is law, in the true sense of the word.
When that brutal monarch, of whom I
have spoken—the great prototype of your
beads of governments that have slavery for
their corner-stone—when he issued his brutal
edict, consigning the male babe of the Hebrew
slave to death, was that law? It was the
order of an absolute sovereign, and was ex-
ecuted by his ministers and minions. But
was it law? When Herod the Tetrarch—I
love to quote these biblical instances to these
scriptural gentlemen; it does me so much
good—when Herod the Tetrarch, bearing
that a king of the Jews was about to be born,
published his brutal edict, commanding the
slaughter of the male children of that time;
and when the voice of lamentation and weep-
ing was heard, Rachel mourning for her chil-
dren, and refusing to be comforted, because
they were not—was that law? It was an
edict, a statute, promulgated by one who had
the power to promulgate it. But it had none
of the elements of law.
And when in later days, by orders of coun-
cil, and bulls, and edicts, men were sent to
the stake because of their religious faith—
was that law? And when that weak and
wicked man, Louis IX, of France, issued his
orders which resulted in the bloody scenes of
St. Bartholomew—was that law? And no
more was the act of 1715 founded in truth,
and justice, and right, than were these, its
predecessors, which I have quoted; not a
whit.
It is getting late, and I am keeping you |
here. [Cries of "Go on," "go on."] I
must long ago have ceased, to interest you.
But I want to say just a few words by way
of general reply. What is slavery? I have
already given its definition as precisely as I
could. is slavery, as a system, right? I
deny that it has any foundation in religion, in
morals, or in law. And I tell yon plainly,
that if those gentlemen who are such deeply-
read biblical scholars, force me to choose be-
tween a Bible that has planted by its author-
ity anything that has so little of justice, of
right, of religion, of law, in or about it, as
human bondage and slavery, and some other
book, so help me God I will turn from it to
that Koran which makes perpetual bondage
under it impossible. I hold the two books
up; one the Bible with the interpretation
these gentlemen give it; the other the Koran.
I would not advise my young friends, espe-
cially the bachelors, to read the Koran. As
I have some gray hairs in my beard, perhaps
I may read it with safety. In some places
the Koran tells about the beautiful black-
eyed girls in green, who welcome the faithful
to Paradise. Perhaps young bachelors had
better not read that portion. But the part
that relates to the question under considera-
tion here, I advise there not only to read, but
carefully to study They will get some les-
sons of humanity from it in this respect, that
they will not get from the Bible as these gen-
tlemen interpret it.
Now, let me state what it seems to me the
whole turn of this discussion here has been
meant to effectuate; and that is, just simply
to resuscitate the old, ruined, rotten, broken-
down, disrupted loco-foco party [laughter]
under a new name, but still it is the same old
thing. Well, my friends, my democratic
friends, are really in a strait—I was about
to say betwixt two. [Laughter.] But I do
not know how many they are in a strait be-
twixt; half a dozen, I should think. Here
is the radical democracy, headed by Mr. Fre-
mont. [Great laughter.] And here is the
war democracy, headed by the gentleman
whom the people of Sew Orleans so eupho-
niously designated "the Beast ;" and here is
the peace democracy, headed by —, well,
the Lord knows who. [Laughter, and cries
of" Vallandigham," " Seymour," "Fernando
Wood."] I have been a great deal puzzled
about the definition of the term "peace de-
mocracy." I sometimes think it means a
piece of democracy [Renewed laughter.] I
rather guess that is about the true meaning
of it.
Now, I want to say to these gentlemen one
thing in this respect. They may as well
quit it and go home, because the thing is dead.
They may galvanize the corpse, and make it
grin hideously; but to bring it to life is an
utter impossibility. They remind me of an
anecdote I once heard, connected with a poor
old gentleman who was my neighbor; a very |
