I know it is said that some of the Northern States are averse to the reception of blacks. Let us analyze this idea. There are now by estimation three millions of slaves. Say one half of these are either too old or too young to have the strength or the intelligence to escape. A million and a half are left; five hundred thousand of these will have attachments to their own parents or children, or to their masters, too strong to be broken; or they may be so degraded as to be contented with bondage; for their contentment is always one of the measures of their degradation. This would leave a million for fugitives, consisting wholly of the most able bodied and intelligent. The Northern States comprise a territory of five hundred thousand square miles. A million of escaped slaves would give but two to a square mile, and this surely would not be a formidable number, even where colorphobia is strongest. Suppose the case of a family of fourteen slaves,--two grandparents, too decrepit for labor, six athletic sons or daughters, and six grand children. What but affection should prevent the able-bodied and the profitable from escaping, and leaving the aged and the young on their masters’ hands. Affection, indeed, would bind the parents to their children, but they know too well how often this bond is remorselessly broken by the master; and, besides, an enlightened affection would look to future children and their posterity forever, as well as to those they already have. Will you make your laws horribly penal, in order to deter slaves from escaping by fear? Will you mutilate them, or scourge them till within a minute of death? Do so. All such punishments not only nourish the love of freedom, but breed the purpose of revenge; and it is a kind of lesson which a brutalized nature is always prone to retaliate with improvements. Will you make the act of escape a capital offence in a slave, and destroy the victim you cannot restrain? Do so. Though you may inflict death in a paroxysm of wrath, yet of all your penal dispensations it is the most merciful. It not only releases the slave himself, but is a prospective and perpetual amnesty,--a true act of oblivion,--for all his descendants. But this extremity of punishment is not likely to be resorted to. In looking over the criminal codes of the slave states, I think I have noted cases where the slave is not punished with death for an offence for which a white man is. The _value_ moderates the vengeance. There are not many who, like Cleopatra, can afford to dissolve a pearl in the cup of revenge, and swallow it at a draught, when that pearl will command five hundred or a thousand dollars in the market-place.