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278 [ASSEMBLT 



become the mass of property holders in the nation? Oh, could they 

 but have had the training in piety which nurtured the fathers of our 

 own Revolution, and like them, have made their declaration of in- 

 dependence, and their bill of rights, a parasite to grow and flourish 

 upon the word of God, far different would have been their present 

 condition, and their apparent prospects. But this process of eman- 

 cipation of human labor must undoubtedly go forward to triumph, 

 whatever shall resist, or through whatever agitations it may be 

 obliged to force its way. The hereditary classes of men will never 

 recover a future permanent sway. Human talent, industry, wisdom 

 and skill under the favoring blessing of a Divine Providence, must 

 now go forth to sow and to gather in the harvest of the earth. We 

 are teaching men lessons of political economy which the world has 

 never heard before. And if it be the fact, that all other nations 

 have had their maturity and decline, the analogy from greatness which 

 has been obtained by plunder and force, to greatness which is ac- 

 quired by the peaceful aits of industry, and the equal dominion of 

 justice, economy and truth can never hold. The myriads of Europe 

 have starved in penury while the adequate means of universal pros- 

 perity and supply have been wasted and thrown away. How absurd 

 is the attempt to remedy the resulting evils of a false and ruinous 

 system, while the system itself is left to propagate them still with 

 equal pow-er. I read the other day, in the Life of Sir Fowell Bux- 

 ton, not only of his great efforts for Africa, but his generous contri- 

 butions and labors for the unceasingly suffering poor in Spitalfieids, 

 where his immense brewery was established. His biographer tells 

 of his skill in the improvements of the brewery, by which he vastly 

 increased its income and his own wealth. But he seems never to 

 have thought that much of the wealth of his brewery came from the 

 poor pennies of these very wretched sufTerers around him, or to have 

 imagined what an improvement it would have been, to have stopped 

 forever this tremendous suction from the vitals of the poor, and to 

 have given them in bread, for nourishment, the grain which he there 

 consumed for their destruction. Under what delusions will good men 

 sometimes labor. His course in this, giving with one hand, only a 

 portion of what he grasped with the other, was like the present at- 

 titude of his government towards the slave trade, professing the deep- 

 est anxiety for the universal freedom of the slave, keeping a fleet 

 upon the coast of Africa, to make the trade as difficult as posssible, 

 thus tenfold increasing its sorrows, by the temptation to diminish the 

 size, and to crowd the cargoes, of the craft engaged in it, and then 

 giving an actual premium to slave grown sugar, to make the reward 



