4. Anti-slavery men seek to set slaves against their masters, at the risk of the lives and happiness of both. This impression, which is much the most common, is, at the same time, the least founded in truth of all. No evidence, worthy of a moment's credit, has ever been produced, implicating any class of them in a suspicion of the kind. Nothing proves the absence of all malignity towards the slaveholders more clearly than this. If they sought really to injure them, what could be more easy than to stimulate disaffection along so extensive a line of boundary as that of the slave States? Probably few of them entertain any doubt of the abstract _right_ of the slave to free himself from the condition in which he is kept against his own consent, in any manner practicable. How easy then the step from this opinion to an act of encouragement! That it has never been taken furnishes the most conclusive proof of the falsity of the popular impression, and of the moderations of the anti-slavery men, who seek only, in the moral convictions of the masters, for the source of freedom to the slaves. But though it be true that all these common impressions are delusions strewn in the way of anti-slavery men to impair the effect of their exertions, it by no means follows that they should be induced by them to assume a moderation which encourages sluggishness. No great movement in human affairs can be made without zeal, energy, and perseverance. It must be animated by a strong will, and tempered by a benevolent purpose. Such is the shape which the anti-slavery reform is gradually assuming. Its motto, then, should be, as was said in the beginning: "TOIL AND TRUST." [Illustration: (signature) Charles Francis Adams.] QUINCY, 10 July, 1853. Friendship for the Slave is Friendship for the Master.