Sublime

wishing you fair winds and following seas.’

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer.

The modern era that followed can be called the era of contract; but it can still more truly be called the era of leonine contract. The nobles of the new time first robbed the people, and then offered to bargain with them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they first robbed the people, and then offered to cheat them.

where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law;

to the end that the office might be powerful and the officer insignificant,

For abolition to spread from Protestant Britain to Catholic and Muslim lands, there needed to be a work of “translation”. Diplomacy required that the language be altered. In 1842 a new phrase was coined. Slavery, said the lawyers, was a crime, not against the Creator, not against Christ, but “a crime against humanity”.