Page:The Under-Ground Railroad.djvu/54

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34

Poor woman, born in a so-called country of freedom, gave birth to a beloved one, whom all regarded as the gift of our Heavenly Father. Like her white sisters, she loved it, but unlike them, had no acknowledged rights; unlike them, rearing it for the auction block; unlike their children, sold as the calf from the cow, to work on the Cotton Plantations, there to be mangled and butchered at the will of the owner. May Heaven have mercy on these people; the bowels of human sympathy seems closed to their piteous cries and bitter wailings. The American people listen with eagerness to the report of wrongs endured by distant nations, which is all well enough. The Hungarian, the Italian, the Irishman, the Jew and the Gentile, all find in that land a home, and when any or all of them wish to speak, they find hearts to sympathise and ears to hear. The Fugitive Slave has no home this side the grave in that Republic; they will not allow him to pass peaceably through the Free States of that glorious Republic, to find a home beyond the land of his birth, in a more favoured country, where equal rights and privileges are allowed to the natural properties of human nature. The soil of America has been cultivated by Slaves for centuries, and they have performed for their masters the humblest services, and by the labour of their sable and sinewy arms the greatest comforts and luxuries of the Slaveholders have been