And with these marks on his back, this image of his Creator must rise at the Last Day.

Yet so untouchable is true dignity, that there are cases wherein to be flogged at the gangway is no dishonour; though, to abase and hurl down the last pride of some sailor who has piqued him, be some-times the secret motive, with some malicious officer, in procuring him to be condemned to the lash.

But this feeling of the innate dignity remaining untouched, though outwardly the body be scarred for the whole term of the natural life, is one of the hushed things, buried among the holiest privacies of the soul; a thing between a man's God and himself; and for ever undiscernible by our fellow-men, who account _that_ a degradation which seems so to the corporal eye.

But what torments must that seaman undergo who, while his back bleeds at the gangway, bleeds agonized drops of shame from his soul! Are we not justified in immeasurably denouncing this thing?
Join hands with me, then; and, in the name of that Being in whose image the flogged sailor is made, let us demand of Legislators, by what right they dare profane what God himself accounts sacred.
Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman?
asks the intrepid Apostle, well knowing, as a Roman citizen, that it was not.
And now, eighteen hundred years after, is it lawful for you, my countrymen, to scourge a man that is an American?
to scourge him round the world in your frigates?
It is to no purpose that you apologetically appeal to the general depravity of the man-of-war's-man.

Depravity in the oppressed is no apology for the oppressor; but rather an additional stigma to him, as being, in a large degree, the effect, and not the cause and justification of oppression..