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ence, your laws will be free to put on their best ornament: then and not till then you may see them simple as they ought to be, simple as those who sent you, simple as yourselves. Yes, citizens: your time, all the time you either have or can make, is the property of those who know you and whom you know: you have none to bestow upon those distant strangers.
Great differences of opinion, and those attended with no little warmth, between the tolerators and proscribers of negro slavery:—emancipation throws all these heart burnings and difficulties out of doors; it is a middle term in which all parties may agree. Keep the sugar islands, it is impossible for you to do right:—let go the negroes, you have no sugar, and the reason for keeping these colonies is at end; keep the negroes, you trample upon the declaration of rights, and act in the teeth of principle.—Scruples must have a term: how sugar is raised is what you need not trouble yourselves about, so long as you do not direct the raising it. Reform the world by example, you act generously and wisely: reform the world by force, you might as well reform the moon, and the design is fit only for lunatics.
The
