Page:Does the Bible sanction American slavery?.djvu/39

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ments have pronounced the doom of their own institution and saved its adversaries further trouble. But it must in fairness to them be owned that they have set their hands to too much. It can scarcely be held that liberty, political or personal, is the inalienable right of every human being. Children possess neither political nor personal liberty, till they arrive at what the law, a law which they had no share in making, pronounces to be years of discretion. Women have no political liberties, and married women have personal liberties only of a very qualified kind. Under despotic governments, the immorality of which can scarcely be held to be in all cases self-evident, no one has political liberty. Even under constitutional governments where the suffrage is limited, as it is to some extent in most of those which are commonly called free countries, the unenfranchised classes are as destitute of political liberty as the subjects of a despotism. The political power which commands their obedience is vested, it is true, in a greater number of hands, and is on that account more controlled by the influence of opinion, and less liable to gross abuse; but it commands their obedience as absolutely and as irrespectively of their own consent, as though it were that of a despotic Prince. The equality between man and man on which this indefeasible claim to political and personal liberty is founded, is in truth rather a metaphysical notion than a fact. Not only children and the weaker sex, but the great mass of men, are so constituted by nature, or so circumstanced, as to be inevitably dependent upon others; and to say that they have an equal right