'Incorporated into our country as freemen, yet separated from it by odious and degrading distinctions, they feel themselves condemned to a hopeless and debasing inferiority. They know that their very complexion will _for ever_ exclude them from the rank, the privileges, the honors, of freemen. No matter how great their industry, or how abundant their wealth--no matter what their attainments in literature, science or the arts--no matter how correct their deportment or what respect their characters may inspire, they can never, NO, NEVER be raised to a footing of equality, not even to a familiar intercourse with the surrounding society.' * * 'To us it seems evident that the man of color may as soon _change his complexion_, as rise above all sense of past inferiority and debasement in a community, from the social intercourse of which, he must expect to be in a great measure excluded, not only until prejudice shall have no existence therein, but until the freedom of man in regulating his social relations is proved to be abridged by some law of morality or the gospel.... Is it not _wise_, then, for the free people of color and their friends to _admit_, what cannot reasonably be doubted, that the people of color must, in this country, remain for ages, _probably for ever_, a separate and inferior caste, weighed down by causes, powerful, universal, inevitable; _which neither legislation nor christianity can remove?_' 'Let the free black in this country 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. 100, 195, 196, 231.]