'The existence, within the very bosom of our country, of an anomalous race of beings, THE MOST DEBASED UPON EARTH, who neither enjoy the blessings of freedom, nor are yet in the bonds of slavery, is a great national evil, which every friend of his country most deeply deplores.... Tax your utmost powers of imagination, and you cannot conceive one motive to honorable effort, which can animate the bosom, or give impulse to the conduct of a free black in this country. Let him toil from youth to age in the honorable pursuit of wisdom--let him store his mind with the most valuable researches of science and literature--and let him add to a highly gifted and cultivated intellect, a piety pure, undefiled, and "unspotted from the world"--it is all nothing: he would not be received into the very lowest walks of society. If we were constrained to admire so uncommon a being, our very admiration would mingle with disgust, because, in the physical organization of his frame, we meet an insurmountable barrier, even to an approach to social intercourse, and in the Egyptian color, which nature has stamped upon his features, a principle of repulsion so strong as to forbid the idea of a communion either of interest or of feeling, as utterly abhorrent. Whether these feelings are founded in reason or not, we will not now inquire--perhaps they are not. But education and habit, and prejudice have so firmly riveted them upon us, that they have become as strong as nature itself--and to expect their removal, or even their slightest modification, would be as idle and preposterous as to expect that we could reach forth our hands, and remove the mountains from their foundations into the vallies, which are beneath them.'--[African Repository, vol. vii. pp. 230, 331.]