"But O!" they say, "look at the iniquitous _system_.

If separating families, and destroying marriage, and liberty to chastise at pleasure, and to kill, are not _sin_, what is sin ?" So they impute the _system_, and everything in it, to the people who live under it.

How a system can be a sin, it would puzzle some of them, who say that all sin consists in action, to explain.

And when they came to look into the system itself, they would find, that if slavery is to exist, some laws regulating it are, of necessity, self-protective, and must be coercive.

Even in Illinois, it is enacted that a black man shall not be a witness against a white man.