The sawing of firewood, and many other sorts of hard labour, are chiefly performed by black people. Happily, very few of these are now slaves in Pennsylvania. Free blacks, it is understood, have no difficulty in earning the means of subsistence, but the circumstance of their being despised and degraded, has had bad effects on their character. Even the Quakers, who have so honourably promoted negro emancipation, allot a separate part of the church to people of colour. In the state prison, too, they are separated from whites. These odious distinctions should be abolished in a free country. Negroes are stigmatized as an inferior race; indolent, dishonest, and vindictive in the extreme. {38} There can be no doubt that, in many instances, these characteristics are too just, but it cannot be otherwise, while moral culture is, in a great measure, withheld from them, while they are excluded from the society of the wise and the good, and while the hope of applause gives no stimulus to the coloured man. Moral or immoral, he is a negro. This, of itself, is enough to keep him down. If Africans were placed on a similar footing, and with the same opportunities, as their white neighbours, and if they still kept behind, we might then begin to suspect a radical defect in their nature. But, as they are, it cannot be pretended that the experiment has been made. For some time past, the democratic party have been nominating candidates for their general support in the ensuing election. No doubt is entertained of a democratic preponderance in the next session of Congress. The Federalist cabal is now disconcerted in this part of the Union. The mercenary avarice that would barter the independence of America for English goods, was never less formidable than now. Here, as at New York, boarding houses are to be found, varying from the simplest accommodations, to elegance and luxury. The person who lives in a house where a high price is paid for board, is separated from the poorer class, and his acquaintances and associates are people in affluent circumstances and polished education; he is as free in the choice of his society as he possibly can be. Without doors, however, persons of lesser note are not treated with _hauteur_, and in transacting business the utmost affability prevails. The dress worn in temperate weather is the same as in Britain, with this difference only, that pantaloons {39} are almost universal: the shorter small-clothes are used only by Quakers. On Sundays it would be difficult to discriminate betwixt the hired girl and the daughter in a genteel family, were drapery the sole criterion. Attentive observation of the people on the streets, would convince any one of the general diffusion of comfort and competence.