The coldness and reserve of her words and tones smote him to the heart. Nevertheless, he replied, “My purpose is no plan of benevolence or philanthropy, my dear India, but a simple act of justice, originating in a simple impulse of conscientiousness.” Then gently repossessing himself of her hand, he held it tenderly in his own, while he began, and, for the fourth time since his return home, related all the mental and moral experiences that had led him to determine upon the contemplated act of emancipation. She heard him out without again interrupting him. She sat very still, with her face pale and impassable, and her eyes cast down. She was no match for him in argument, yet, nevertheless, seeing that he silently awaited her answer, and preferring to convert rather than to cast him off, she recalled and repeated all the arguments she had ever heard in defence of slavery; she began by saying that she thought the existence of the system of slavery to be the manifest will and ordination of Divine Providence; and she wondered how any rational being could doubt it. Was not their present subordinate position here infinitely preferable to their former savage and cannibal condition on the coast of Congo? Here at least they were Christianized. A smile dawned upon the young man’s countenance. She saw and felt it. Her cheek flushed, and she hastened to say— “They must be blind indeed, Mr. Sutherland, who cannot see in the enslavement of the African race by the Anglo-Saxons the purpose of Divine Providence to civilize Africa.” Mark Sutherland took her hand, and replied gently— “My dear India, we do not deny that God continually brings good out of evil; but is _that_ a justification of the evil? And even admitting, for argument’s sake, that the reduction of a portion of the Ethiopian race to slavery by the Anglo-Americans is to be the means of Christianizing them, is it not full time, after two hundred years of bondage, that some of this harvest sowed with tears and blood should be reaped?—that some of these good fruits should begin to be enjoyed?” “Besides,” said Miss Sutherland, eluding his question and evading his eye, “there is a fitness in these relations between the European and the African races—Europeans could not engage in agricultural labour under the burning heat of our Southern sun”—— “But why _enslave_ the negroes—why not emancipate and hire them?” interrupted Mark. “O! you know,” she replied, hastily, “that the negroes will not work effectually, unless driven to it.” “Plantation slaves will not, I grant you; but what has reduced them to this hopeless and inert condition?”