But to return. Why have the efforts for the elevation of the free colored people, not been more successful? On this point our remarks may be limited to our own free colored people. The barrier to their progress here, exists not so much in their want of capacity, as in the absence of the incitements to virtuous action, which are constantly stimulating the white man to press onward and upward in the formation of character and the acquisition of knowledge. There is no position in church or state, to which the poorest white boy, in the common school, may not aspire. There is no post of honor, in the gift of his country, that is legally beyond his reach. But such encouragements to noble effort, do not and cannot reach the colored man, and he remains with us a depressed and disheartened being. Persuading him to remain in this hopeless condition, has been the great error of the abolitionists. They accepted Jefferson's views in relation to emancipation, but rejected his opinions as to the necessity of separating the races; and thus overlooked the teachings of history, that two races, differing so widely as to prevent their amalgamation by marriage, can never live together, in the same community, but as superiors and inferiors--the inferior remaining subordinate to the superior. The encouraging hopes held out to the colored people, that this law would be inoperative upon them, has led only to disappointment. Happily, this delusion is nearly at an end; and some of them are beginning to act on their own judgments. They find themselves so scattered and peeled, that there is not another half a million of men in the world, so enlightened, who are accomplishing so little for their social and moral advancement. They perceive that they are nothing but branches, wrenched from the great African _banyan_, not yet planted in genial soil, and affording neither shelter nor food to the beasts of the forest or the fowls of the air--their roots unfixed in the earth, and their tender shoots withering as they hang pendent from their boughs. That this is no exaggerated picture of the discouragements surrounding our free colored people, is fully confirmed by the testimony of impartial witnesses. Chambers, of Edinburgh, who recently made the tour of the United States, investigated this point very carefully. His opinions on the subject have been published, and are so discriminating and truthful, that we must quote the main portion of them. In speaking of the agitation of the question of slavery, he says: