“I do not know why you should call their condition hopeless—I think, upon the whole, they are at least as hopeful and as happy as poor white people, or free blacks. And I never heard of a bad master, who was not also a bad son, brother, husband, father, neighbour—in short, who was not a bad Christian. And if you feel a call to reform the world, Mark Sutherland, why not begin at the right end, and Christianize it—and all other reform will follow early, and as a matter of course. Why not do that?” “Because, my dear India, unluckily the world thinks itself already Christian. ‘And if the light that is in it be darkness, how great is that darkness?’ Neither, my dear girl, am I the missionary to dispel it. I am quite unworthy of, and unpretending to, the name of Christian, and have no presumption to begin reforming the world, either at the right end or the wrong end. I only wish to do what I consider a simple act of justice, in a matter between me and my own conscience.” “I do not understand why your ‘conscience’ should meddle in the matter. The system appears to me to be perfectly right—every thing that we can wish. There is a beautiful adaptation in the mutual relations existing between the Anglo-Saxon master and the Ethiopian slave; for, observe, the Anglo-Saxon is highly intellectual, strong, proud, firm, self-willed, impelled to govern, gifted with great mental independence; the Ethiopian, on the contrary, is very _un_intellectual, weak, lowly in mind, imitative, affectionate, docile, easily controlled—and these traits of character so harmonize in this connection, that it seems to need only the spirit of Christianity to make it a beautiful and happy correspondence.” “I think, my dearest girl, that even in that case the ‘beautiful and happy correspondence’ would be like Irish reciprocity—_all on one side_. Selfishness so blinds us, India”—— I have no space to dilate on what was said on either side. Both grew very serious, earnest, and emphatic. India became heated, fevered; she brought forward every plea she had ever heard pressed in favour of her own side of the controversy; but she was not his equal in logic. Baffled and disappointed in her failure, and unnerved by the strangeness of anxiety and contention, she suddenly burst into tears, and passionately exclaimed— “You do not love me! You never loved me! You prefer the fancied welfare of these miserable negroes to my comfort and happiness!”