He also availed himself of this opportunity to show the wrong way and the right way in our treatment of this whole question of slavery. I can only mention the heads, but they so far outline his whole principle of action during the war that I give them that his position may be understood: “1st. We have no right to treat the citizens of the South with acrimony and bitterness because they are involved in a system of wrong-doing.” “2d. The breeding of discontent among the bondmen of our land is not the way to help them.” “3d. No relief will be carried to the slaves or to the South as a body by any individual or organized plans to carry them off or to incite them to abscond.” As to the right way: “1st. If we would benefit the African at the South we must begin at home. No one can fail to see the inconsistency between our treatment of those amongst us who are in the lower walks of life and our professions of sympathy for the Southern slaves. How are the free colored people treated at the North? They are almost without education, with but little sympathy for ignorance. They are refused the common rights of citizenship which the whites enjoy. They cannot even ride in the cars of our city railroads. They are snuffed at in the house of God, or tolerated with ill-disguised disgust. Can the black man be a mason in New York? Let him be employed as a journeyman, and every Irish lover of liberty that carries the hod or trowel would leave at once or compel him to leave! Can the black man be a carpenter? There is scarcely a carpenter’s shop in New York in which a journeyman would continue to work if a black man were employed in it. Can the black man compete in the common industries of life? There is scarcely one in which he can engage. He is crowded down, down, down, through the most menial callings, to the bottom of society. We tax them, and then refuse to allow their children to go to our public schools. We tax them, and then refuse to sit by them in God’s house. We heap upon them moral obloquy more atrocious than that which the master heaps upon the slave.” “2d. We must quicken all the springs of feeling in the free States in behalf of human liberty, and create a public sentiment based upon truth and true manhood.” “3d. By all the ways consistent with a fearless assertion of truth, we must maintain sympathy and kindness toward the South. If, in view of the wrongs of slavery, you say that you do not care for the master but only the slave, I reply that you _should_ care for both master _and_ slave! If _you_ do not care for the fate of the wrong-doing white man, _I_ do care for the fate of the wrong-doing white man! But even though your sympathy were only for the slave, then for his sake you ought to set your face against, and discountenance anything like, an insurrectionary spirit.” “4th. We are to leave no pains untaken, through the Christian conscience of the South, to give to the slave himself a higher moral status.”