tion, addressed to Richard Pindell of Lexington, but intended for the people of Kentucky. That part of the letter which exposed the absurdity of the reasons usually brought forward to justify slavery might well have come from the pen of a life-long abolitionist. If slavery were really a blessing, he reasoned, “the principle on which it is maintained would require that one portion of the white race should be reduced to bondage to serve another portion of the same race, when black subjects of slavery could not be obtained; and that in Africa, where they may entertain as great a preference for their color as we do for ours, they would be justified in reducing the white race to slavery in order to secure the blessings which that state is said to diffuse.” In the same style he punctured the argument that the superiority of the white race over the black justified the enslavement of the inferior. “It would prove entirely too much,” said he. “It would prove that any white nation which had made greater advances in civilization, knowledge, and wisdom than another white nation would have the right to reduce the latter to a state of bondage. Nay, further, if the principle be applicable to races and nations, what is to prevent its being applied to individuals? And then the wisest man in the world would have a right to make slaves of all the rest of mankind.” There was in this something of Benjamin Franklin's manner of pointing an argument. Clay had evidently written it with zest.
He deeply lamented that emancipation had not
