Justification of Slavery

"' on this abstract question of slavery there can, as I think, be but one opinion. Planters, who have money to make by it,-clergymen, who have planters to please,-politicians, who want to rule by it, -may warp and bend language and ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their ingenuity; they can press nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what else, into the service; but, after all, neither they nor the world believe in it one particle the more. It comes from the devil, that's the short of it;-and, to my mind, it's a pretty respectable specimen of what he can do in his own line.'" Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 221