Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Dale Owen

A hard-edged compliment wrapped around a moral ultimatum, Owen’s line is built to corner its target. He flatters the listener’s agency - “within your power at this very moment” - then raises the stakes so high that delay starts to look like cowardice. The phrasing is almost legalistic in its precision (“consummate an act”), but the payoff is spiritual theater: the politician is invited to see himself not merely as a strategist, but as “the instrument of the Almighty.” That move matters. In a 19th-century American political culture saturated with Protestant moral language, it translates a policy choice into a test of salvation-grade responsibility.

The subtext is shrewd: Owen is not only arguing for emancipation; he’s offering a way for power to save face. Ending slavery becomes “enlightened statesmanship” - a modern, rational achievement - while simultaneously satisfying the era’s religious idiom. It’s a rhetorical two-key turn: appeal to progress and to providence, so the intended decision-maker can claim both moral purity and historical greatness.

Contextually, Owen belongs to the reformist wing of American politics (and a broader transatlantic current of abolition and social improvement). His diction reflects an abolitionist strategy that often tried to pierce institutional inertia by personalizing responsibility: you, now, can “restore to freedom a race of men.” The troubling phrase “a race of men” signals the period’s paternalism even as it reaches for liberation, revealing how abolitionist arguments could be morally urgent while still speaking from a stance of power over the people being freed.