Yes, it is such things as these, simple and inconsiderable as you may deem them, which are dividing us irreconcilably, and breaking up the Union. It is not Messrs. ----, nor their frenzy, but it is Christian brethren who allow their Sabbath-school children, for example, to say and sing, "I've heard mistress telling her sweet little son, what Jesus, the loving, for children has done," making the impression that such a Christian mother leaves a colored child in her house, without instruction, to draw the inference, if it will, that Jesus, perhaps, will love a "poor little slave!" There are no words to depict the feeling of injustice and cruelty which this conveys to the hearts of our Christian friends at the South. "Let us go out of the Union!" they cry, in their blind grief; but where will they go? for while our Northern people write and publish and sing and teach their children to sing such things, we can have nothing but mutual hatred, and perhaps exterminating wars. We must change. If our Northern people would discriminate, and, while retaining all their natural feelings against oppression and man-stealing, would admit that "ownership in man" is not necessarily oppression nor man-stealing, they would do themselves justice and contribute to the peace of the country. "But O!" they say, "look at the iniquitous _system_. If separating families, and destroying marriage, and liberty to chastise at pleasure, and to kill, are not _sin_, what is sin?" So they impute the _system_, and everything in it, to the people who live under it. How a system can be a sin, it would puzzle some of them, who say that all sin consists in action, to explain. And when they came to look into the system itself, they would find, that if slavery is to exist, some laws regulating it are, of necessity, self-protective, and must be coercive. Even in Illinois, it is enacted that a black man shall not be a witness against a white man. But if the slaves could swear in court, every one sees that the whites must be at the mercy of their servants. The testimony of the honest among them is procured, though indirectly, and it has weight with juries; but it is a wise provision to exclude them as sworn witnesses. So of other things, which theoretically are oppressive, but practically right; while many things in the system which are rigorous are as little used as the equipments in an arsenal in times of peace.