(excerpt)

Liberty is the ownership of oneself. We distinguish three kinds of liberty: natural liberty, civil liberty, and political liberty—in other words, the liberty of the individual, the liberty of the citizen, and the liberty of a people. Natural liberty is the right nature has given every person to dispose of themselves as they wish. Civil liberty is the right society must guarantee to each citizen to do whatever is not contrary to the laws. Political liberty is the condition of a people that has not surrendered its sovereignty, but makes its own laws or takes part in making them.

The first of these liberties is, after reason, the distinguishing characteristic of humanity. Animals are chained and subdued because they have no conception of right and wrong, no sense of greatness or baseness. But in me, liberty is the source of my vices and my virtues. Only a free person can say, “I will” or “I will not,” and can therefore deserve praise or blame. Without liberty—the ownership of one’s body and the independent use of one’s mind—one is neither spouse, parent, relative, nor friend. One has no country, fellow citizens, or God.

In the hands of an evil man, the slave becomes an instrument of his crimes, and is reduced to a condition lower even than that of the dog the Spaniard unleashed against the Indigenous American: the dog has no conscience, but the human being still has one. Anyone who cowardly gives up their liberty is left to remorse and to the greatest misery a thinking, feeling being can endure. If there is no power under heaven that can change my nature and reduce me to an animal, then there is no power that can dispose of my liberty. “God is my father, not my master. I am his child, not his slave. How, then, could I grant political power what I refuse to divine omnipotence?”

Will these eternal and unchanging truths—the foundation of all morality and the basis of every rational government—be challenged? Yes. And the audacity to commit this crime against humanity will come from a barbarous and sordid love of money. Look at the shipowner, bent over his desk, pen in hand, calculating how many murders he can order on the coasts of Guinea. He calmly works out how many guns he will need to buy an African man, how many chains to keep him bound aboard his ship, and how many whips to force him to work. He calculates how much each drop of blood will earn him, blood with which the enslaved man will water his estate. He debates whether an African woman will be more profitable working with her frail hands or risking her life in childbirth.

You shudder. Ah! If there is a religion that tolerates such horrors, that authorizes them even by its silence; if, while occupied with useless or demagogic questions, it does not ceaselessly curse the authors and instruments of this tyranny; if it calls it a crime for an enslaved person to break their chains; if it tolerates in its midst the wicked judge who sentences a fugitive to death—if such a religion exists, should we not bury its ministers beneath the ruins of their altars?