"A cunning piece of rhetoric," answered my acute friend, "peculiarly illustrative of the rhetoric of fanatics. Do you not remark that whenever they have a point to carry, they employ a figure, and in that figure they pre-suppose a complete parity between two really dissimilar cases. Knock away the _petition principia_, and what do you find? Here he places a white man, always accustomed to freedom, and with all the intellectual qualities impliedly cultivated by a white man's education, with a white man's wants, wishes, habits, and feelings, exactly upon a par with a negro born upon a plantation, habituated from infancy to slavery, without a thought, a desire, or a notion beyond the state in which he was brought up, except such as may have been instilled into him by abolitionists. Is this fair to begin with? Is there a parity between the two cases? Then again, the white man in flying from the bonds which had been accidentally imposed upon him, returns to home, to his ancient habits, to the free use of faculties and endowments which are sure, if rightly employed, to lead to competence, if not to wealth, to independence, and to ease. The negro flying from his master, on the contrary, leaves family and friends, old habits and associations, food, care, and protection in sickness or old age, for a wide, unfriended, uncertain, future, where there is nothing probable but long-protracted labour, unbefriended sickness, unpitied decrepitude, and death on a dunghill. His nominal independence is shackled by the continual necessity of seeking food by labour; and his freedom becomes a curse instead of a blessing, in consequence of the prejudices of colour and caste. Is there any parity between these two cases? I declare I would a great deal rather be a slave to the hardest master I have ever seen in Virginia--and I have now been here many years--than I would be a free negro in an abolition state. But this was all rhetoric, mere rhetoric, the most cowardly and contemptible of all species of sophistry. Much better to say boldly, 'You have no right to reduce any man to slavery--you shall not do evil that good may come of it--the Declaration of Independence says, that all men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By holding any man in slavery, whatever be his colour, you violate this first great principle of the American constitution, you break the solemn pact upon which this union was founded, by which alone she claimed, maintained, and accomplished her independence of Great Britain.' Better to say this, and fight it out upon this ground, than go sneakingly to work to get petty advantages in Congress, or criminally strive to render the slaves discontented with their masters. I have come to the conclusion, my dear Sir Richard, that the abolitionists are the very worst enemies of the slaves themselves, who, after all, are but mere----"