'The fact was most glaring, without an inquiry, that the same shackles which bound them, fastened them also to the resources of the soil, and the interests of the community; and when these were broken, and the incentives of authority removed, the weight of ignorance, the want of better incentives, and the fatal and untried power of grateful but ruinous idleness, sunk them to a state, which, however elevated in theory, was in fact more degraded and more miserable than that of bondage. In addition to all this, pauperism, with the numerous evils of corrupt and corrupting indolence, threatened to impose its sluggish weight upon a groaning community. Hence, the progress of emancipation was, for the time, most righteously arrested.'--[Address of the Board of Managers of the African Education Society.] 'Who are the free people of color in the United States? In what circumstances does philanthropy find them! There are indeed individuals and families, who are sober, industrious, pious. But what are the remainder, the mass? Every one knows that their condition is deep and wretched degradation; but, only a few have ever formed any accurate conception of the reality. The fact is, that as a class they are branded. They have no home, no country, no such personal interest in the welfare of the community, as gives a certain degree of manliness to almost every white man.... Three hundred thousand freemen in this country, are freemen only in name, forming only little else than a mass of pauperism and crime.... Here the black man is paralysed and crushed by the constant sense of inferiority. He has no effectual incentives to manly enterprise. He stands in a degraded class of society; and out of that class he never dreams of rising.'--[Christian Spectator.] 'This is the true condition of the free colored population of our land. They are placed mid way between freedom and slavery; they feel neither the moral stimulants of the one, nor the restraints of the other, and are alike injurious to every other class of the community.'--[Southern Religious Telegraph.]