276 AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. 



said " We are not used to regard that class in forming a judg- 

 ment of national character." And yet I suppose that class is 

 larger in numbers than any other in the community of England. 

 Many have even dared to think that, in the mysterious decrees 

 of Providence, this balance of degradation and supine misery is 

 essential to the continuance of the greatness, prosperity, and ele- 

 vated character of the country as if it were not indeed a part 

 of the country. 



A minister of the Gospel, of high repute in London, and whose 

 sermons are reprinted and often repeated in America, from the 

 words of Christ, " the poor ye have always among you," argued 

 lately that all legislation or cooperative benevolence that had the 

 tendency and hope of bringing about such a state of things that 

 a large part of every nation should be independent of the charity 

 of the other part, was heretical and blasphemous. Closely allied 

 to such ideas are the too common notions of rulers and subjects. 



In America we hold that a slave, a savage, a child, a maniac, 

 and a condemned criminal, are each and all born equally with 

 us, with our President, or with the Queen of England, free and 

 self-governing ; that they have the same natural rights with us ; 

 but that attached to those natural rights were certain duties, and 

 when we find them, from whatever cause no matter whether the 

 original cause be with them, or our fathers, or us unable to 

 perform those duties, we dispossess them of their rights : we 

 restrain, we confine, we master, we govern them. But in 

 taking upon ourselves to govern them, we take other duties, and 

 our first duty is that which is the first duty of every man for 

 himself improvement, restoration, regeneration. By every con- 

 sideration of justice, by every noble instinct, we are bound to 

 make it our highest and chiefest object to restore them, not the 

 liberty first, but the capacity for the liberty for exercising the 

 duties of the liberty which is their natural right. And so much 



