Here is a view of the case that may not be unworthy of attention: It is the energy of the white man that has made this country what it is, and his _alone_ that will make it what it is to be. To the sinew, the nerve, the strong arm, the moral and physical courage, and the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race, is the world indebted for the grand spectacle we now present as a great, happy and prosperous people; and to the same ennobling elements and excellencies in the composition of the white man will the vast republican empire, now spreading its arms over the whole earth, be indebted for its existence and perpetuation. Holding this view, it cannot be then said that I was educating negroes as rivals or competitors of my brothers and sisters of a superior race. Holding to this opinion, with a tenacity that is as inseparable from my judgment as is color from the Ethiopian,--knowing, as I do, from all history as well as all cotemporary observation and record, that the Caucasian race are the “most godlike,” and the authors of all in the arts and sciences that contributes most to man’s more refined tastes, pleasures, and ambition. I am sure that I could not, South nor North, attempt to change the “Ethiopian’s skin” in the vain endeavor to make him an equal--socially, politically, or even morally--with my own race. No such thing, however, was charged upon me. My offence consisted in teaching a few poor colored children, free by the laws of their own State, to read the Bible, the very book on which the institutions of our land are based. Common charity, then, would have attributed to me only a feeling of sympathy for a lower order of society; common charity, as had been the case before, in Virginia, would have looked with a lenient eye upon what _the want of all charity_ construed into a crime!