"The serving people, in some districts of country, are volunteers from all races; at the South, they consist of one inferior, dependent race, who for ages have been slaves in their own country, and would be such even now, if they were there. We will not shut the door of hope forever upon any part of the human family, as to their elevation among the tribes of men, but this race has, for a long period of its history, evidently been undergoing a tutelage and discipline at the hand of Providence. There is some marvellous arrangement of Providence, it seems to me, designing that this black race shall lean upon us. Let the same number of any other immigrant race have gone from us to Canada as of this colored race, and the world would have heard a better report from them ere this. They thrive best in connection with us as their masters, whether it be right or wrong for us to be in such relation to them." "But now," said he,--in a persuasive tone, and evidently wishing to turn the drift of the remarks,--"just set them free, and hire them; we shall agree then. The slaves will be as well off, and so will their masters." "Mr. North," said I, "being owned is, in itself, irrespective of the character of the master, a means of protection to the negro. Somebody then is responsible for him as his guardian and provider, and is amenable to the State for his sustenance. You can easily see that, let the colored people come to be a hireling class, and their interests and those of their masters are disjoined. There would be conflicts and oppressions among themselves; they would fall into a degraded, serf-like condition; but now each of them partakes of his master's interests, and rises with him. I am not here pleading for slavery in the abstract, but, the blacks being on the soil, it is far better for them to be owned than to be free. Why are the Southwestern States, one after another, passing laws, or framing their constitutions, to shut out from their borders free negroes,--people in the very condition into which you would reduce by wholesale all the blacks in the South? I pray you look and see that you are an abstractionist, setting what you deem a theoretical wrong against a practical good, and under the circumstances, a real mercy." "But," said Mr. North, "slavery impoverishes the soil, makes the whites shun labor, feeling it to be degrading, and it keeps the white children from industrial pursuits, and"--