Though an enemy to slavery, I would have the true friends of the blacks pursue a course that will tend to their lasting advantage. There is no great urgency, on their own accounts, that abolition should be immediate; and I do not hesitate to pronounce the sympathy false and perverted, which dwells on the miseries of their situation. If we except the lot itself, their condition is far better than it would be were they freed; and infinitely better than that of our city blacks, or even many of our laboring whites. That their being slaves is a sufficient cause for discontent, I admit, did they consider it so. The mass, however, know and think nothing about it. They recollect nothing else, and therefore the loss of liberty is scarcely a deprivation. Servitude of any sort is a grievous yoke; it is hard to be poor; yet none but visionaries ever indulge in the Utopian scheme of a perfect happiness. That slavery is an evil, that it is a great and a growing evil, none who think at all on the subject can deny; slave-holders themselves are well convinced of this truth, and many of them would rejoice to have the evil removed, could proper means be devised, independently of robbing them of their lawful property. They cannot consent to make themselves and their children beggars, which would be the case, were slavery immediately abolished; for without a sufficient force to work their land, it is worth nothing. My own opinion coincides with that of Paley: 'The emancipation of slaves should be gradual, and be carried on by provisions of law, and under the protection of civil government. Christianity can only operate as an alternative. By the mild diffusion of its light and influence, the minds of men are insensibly prepared to perceive and correct the enormities which folly, or wickedness, or accident, have introduced into their public establishments. In this way, the Greek and Roman slavery, and since these, the feudal tyranny, has declined before it. And we trust that, as the knowledge and authority of the same religion advance in the world, they will banish what remains of this odious institution.' This opinion, I am aware, does not accord with the schemes of the reformers of the present age. They wish to reap the reward of their exertions in their own day; no matter what individual loss or suffering it may occasion to whites; no matter what injury accrues to a million and a half of ignorant, improvident blacks, let loose upon society without a motive, a principle to guide them, or a desire above the fulfilment of their animal wants. 'The world is wrong, all wrong!' cries out an hundred reformers. That it is mad, on certain subjects, I verily believe. One sect announce that their own peculiar religious tenets will alone make man happy here, and wise unto salvation, and denounce the rest of the world as lost, and that their teachers knowingly delude their followers. Another party are so zealous in the cause of temperance, that they are the most