After a brief introduction the book treats of the free Negro and the slave. Then comes the chapter on the organization, purpose, and early record of the Society. Attention is next directed to the conflict between the colonizationists and the abolitionists. Colonization is afterward discussed in connection with emancipation and finally with the African slave trade. Throughout the whole treatise there is a defense of the "lofty" motives of the men who labored so hard for the expatriation of the Negroes. As the author sees it, although the Society did not send many Negroes to Africa, it was after all a success; for it had a bearing on the emancipation of slaves, and on the suppression of the African slave trade. Abolitionists, attacking this undertaking based upon national sentiment, were endangering the union by their propaganda founded upon sectional sentiment. Colonization, therefore, was just because it was "born out of a desire to unite the North and the South in the settlement of the Negro problem." The purpose of the treatise then is to (page 127) "set forth the true aims of orthodox Colonizationists, or from another point to demonstrate that their aims were as sincerely expressed as sound policy would admit, and that, where motives were concealed, they were concealed in order to secure the freedom of the slaves." Written from this point of view the dissertation becomes too much of a polemic to be accepted as a scientific treatise. Too much space is devoted to the task of unifying the widely different views of the colonizationists, too much effort is made to contrast the methods of the colonizationists with those of the abolitionists. The author does not seem to realize or at least fails to admit that the abolitionists were radical reformers seeking to eradicate the cause of social disease whereas the colonizationists were merely treating the symptoms of the malady in undertaking the impossible task of transplanting a whole race.