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 por-
tion of the same race, when black subjects of slav-
ery 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 justi-
fied 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 ar-
gument 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 Ben-
jamin Franklin's manner of pointing an argument,
Clay had evidently written it with zest.

He deeply lamented that emancipation had not

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