MY DEAR FRIEND,—In responding to thy welcome communication, I may say that I rejoice in the cause of the interruption of our correspondence, so far as it concerns thyself; thy time and talents being so increasingly occupied, in union with other of humanity’s advocates, in assisting to overturn the monster iniquity of our age, that crowning crime of Christendom,—_negro slavery_! Go on in this good work! and may God’s blessing abundantly attend, till the eternal overthrow be effected of a system so fraught with every evil, so abhorrent to the rights of nature, and so contrary to the spirit of the Gospel;—till the galling chain be broken off the necks of America’s three million slaves; till its victims be raised from the profoundest depths of ignorance and woe, to which they are now degraded. ’Tis a marvel to me, that a system like that of negro slavery, which admits of such atrocities, can be tolerated for a single hour! Ought not every one who has a spark of humanity, to say nothing of Christianity, in his bosom,—ought not all the sound part of every community in which slavery exists, to rise up _en masse_, and declare that this abomination shall exist no longer? Who gave to any man the right to enslave his fellow-man? Can any enactment of human legislators so far sanction robbery, as lawfully to make one man the property of another? Has God poured the tide of life through the African’s breast, and animated it with a portion of his own Divine spirit, and at the same time deprived him of all natural affections, that _he_ alone is to be struck off the list of rational beings, and placed on a level with the brute? Is his flesh marble, and his sinews iron, or his immortal spirit of a class condemned, without hope, to penal suffering, that he is called upon to endure incessant toil, and to be subjected to degradation, bodily and mental, such as no other portion of the family of Adam have ever been destined to endure, without the vengeance of Heaven being signally displayed upon the oppressors? Does the African mother feel less love to her offspring than the white woman? or the African husband regard with less tenderness the wife of his bosom? Is his heart dead to the ties of kindred,—his nature so brutalized, that the sacred associations of home and country awaken no emotions in his breast? History unanswerably demonstrates that the negro does feel, keenly feel, the wrongs inflicted upon him by his unrighteous enslavers, and that his mind, barren as it has been rendered by hard usage, and desolated with misery, is not unwatered by the pure and gentle streams of natural affection. Yet the lordly oppressors remain unmoved by the sad condition of the negro, contemplate with indifference his bodily and mental sufferings, and still dare to postpone to an indefinite period the termination of his oppression and of their own guilt.