“I am free to work for humanity. My time is my own. I can spend it freely in making experiments and investigations that can hardly fail to benefit mankind. Few men who are equipped for such studies can spare time for them from the breadwinning. Then again when great epidemics occur anywhere, and multitudes need me, I am free to go and serve them. I have no family, no wife, no children, nobody dependent upon me, in short no obligations of any kind to restrain me from such service. Such at least was my situation before my Uncle Robert died. His death imposed upon me the duty of caring for all these black people. My first thought was of how I might most quickly free myself of this restraining obligation. Had the estate consisted only of houses and lands and other inanimate property I should have made short work of the business. I should have sold the whole of it for whatever men might be willing to give me for it; I should have devoted the proceeds to some humane purpose, and then, being free again I should have returned to my work. Unfortunately, however, in succeeding to my uncle’s estate I succeeded also to his obligations. I planned to fulfil them once for all by selling the plantation and using the proceeds in carrying the negroes to the west and establishing them upon farms of their own. I still cherish that purpose, but I am delayed in carrying it out by the fact that other obligations must first be discharged. There are debts--the hereditary curse of us Virginians--and I find that the value of the plantation, without the negroes, would not suffice to discharge them and leave enough to give the negroes the little farms that I must provide for them if I take the responsibility of setting them free. Still I see ways in which I think I can overcome that difficulty within two or three years, by selling crops that Virginians never think of selling and devoting their proceeds to the discharge of debts. But now comes this new and burdensome duty of caring for Dorothy’s estate. She is now sixteen years of age, so that this new burden must rest upon my shoulders for five full years to come.” “I quite understand,” Edmonia slowly replied, “and in great part I sympathize with you. But not altogether. For one thing I do not share your belief in freedom for the negroes. I am sure they are unfit for it, and it would be scarcely less than cruelty to take them out of the happy life to which they were born, exile them to a strange land, and condemn them to a lifelong struggle with conditions to which they are wholly unused, with poverty for their certain lot and starvation perhaps for their fate. They are happy now. Why should you condemn them to unhappy lives? They are secure now in the fact that, sick or well, in age and decrepitude as well as in lusty health, they will be abundantly fed and clothed and well housed. Why should you condemn them to an incalculably harder lot?”