This was a subject of frequent remark by foreigners travelling in America. Captain Marryat, writing of conditions in Philadelphia in 1838, says, "Singular is the degree of contempt and dislike in which the free blacks are held in all the free states of America. They are deprived of their rights as citizens; and the white pauper who holds out his hand for charity ... will turn away from a negro or colored man with disdain."[299] DeTocqueville, in a remarkable characterization of the relations between the races based upon his observations in the early thirties, says that as the legal barriers fall away in the free States those of race prejudice are drawn all the sharper. Wherever the freemen have increased the gap has widened between them and the whites. "The prejudice which repels the negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated, and inequality is sanctioned by the manners while it is effaced from the laws of the country. Though having the franchise the Negro may not exercise the right for fear of his life;[300] his rights before the law are pronounced upon by white judges only; his children may not attend the same school with the white's and gold can not buy a ticket for him in the same theater; he lies apart in the hospital, worships at a different altar and must bury his dead in a different cemetery."[301] Harriet Martineau, writing in 1834-35 and commenting upon the statement of a Boston gentleman that the Negroes were perfectly well treated in New England in the matter of education, the franchise, and otherwise, states that while they are nominally citizens, "yet their houses and schools are pulled down,[302] and they can obtain no remedy at law. They are thrust out of offices, and excluded from the most honorable employments, and stripped of all the best benefits of society by fellow-citizens who, once a year, solemnly lay their hands on their hearts, and declare that all men are born free and equal, and that rulers derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."[303] Fanny Kemble, the English actress, writes in 1838-39 of the treatment of the free blacks at the North, "They are marked as the Hebrew lepers of old, and are condemned to sit, like these unfortunates, without the gates of every human and social sympathy. From their own sable color, a pall falls over the whole of God's universe to them, and they find themselves stamped with a badge of infamy of Nature's own devising, at sight of which all natural kindness of man to man seems to recoil from them. They are not slaves indeed, but they are pariahs; debarred from all fellowship save with their own despised race--scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your streets, not tolerated as companions by the foreign menials in your kitchens. They are free certainly but they are also degraded, rejected, the offscum and the offscouring of the very dregs of your society; they are free from the chain, the whip, the enforced task and