It is easy to note a change in the mental atmosphere as we pass to the States farther south. The Assembly of Delaware tabled indefinitely a bill of 1785 for the gradual abolition of slavery, and Maryland in her declaration of rights adopted in 1776 restricted the enjoyment of certain rights _to freemen only_. A petition introduced in the House of Burgesses of Virginia in 1785, asking for general emancipation on the ground that slavery was contrary to the principles of religion and the ideas of freedom on which the government was founded, was read and rejected without an opposing voice; Washington remarked in a letter to Lafayette that it could hardly get a hearing.[158] In fact, there is evidence for believing that, while leading men such as Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Mason and Pinkney saw the evil of slavery and wished heartily to rid their States of it, the mass of the citizens of Maryland and Virginia did not wish to do away with the institution either because of social habits and economic interests, or because they felt unable to cope with the problem of an emancipated black population. It must be remembered that in Maryland there were three slaves to five whites, in Virginia and Georgia the numbers were about equal, in South Carolina there were two slaves to one white, while in Massachusetts there were sixty whites to one slave.[159] In the States farther south, the Carolinas and Georgia, no change or attempted change in the status of the slave seems to have occurred. The force of social and economic habits was already too strong for the movings of the spirit of freedom to affect the status of the slave. The leaders of the time realized this only too well. Patrick Henry, writing to a Quaker in 1773, said that slavery was "as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive of liberty. Every thinking honest man rejects it as speculation, but how few in practice from conscientious motives! Would any one believe that I am a master of slaves of my own purchase? _I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them._"[160] Jefferson in a letter written in 1815 expressed the hope that slavery would in time yield "to the enlargement of the human mind, and its advancement in science," but he confessed also that "where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the Northern States it was merely superficial and easily corrected; in the Southern, it is incorporated with the whole system, and requires time, patience and perseverance in the curative process. That it may finally be effected and its progress hastened, will be my last and fondest prayer."[161]