Said I, “What a perfect specimen of Northern anti-slavery feeling and logic have we in what you now say.  If a man, on suspicion of you, takes the law into his hands and shoots you with a pistol, does he not deserve to die?  He does, if he is a white man; perhaps, if he be a slave, that excuses him!  Even where a man is known to be guilty of the crime referred to, and the husband shoots him, he is apt to have a narrow escape from being punished.  As to bearing such violations of one’s rights in silence under intimidation, there is no more power in intimidation to save a villain at the South from disgrace and abhorrence in his community, than at the North.”

“But he can evade prosecution under the statute,” said Mr. North, “more easily at the South than here.”

“When you have served on the grand jury a few terms,” said I, “you will be more charitable toward Southerners.  Human nature is the same everywhere.  It makes, where it does not find, occasion for sin.

“Now you will not understand, in all that I have said, that I am pleading for slavery, that I desire to have this abject race among us, that Southerners are purer and better than we.  We are both under sin.  We all have our temptations and trials; each form of society has its own kind of facilities for evil; but the grace of God and all the influences which bear on the formation and the preservation of character, are the same wherever Christianity prevails.”

“Well, after all,” said he, “it must be a semi-barbarous state of society, where such a system is maintained.”

“I shall have to send you,” said I, “to the ‘Hotel des Incurables.’  I think that your judgments are more than semi-barbarous.  If you please to term even the Southern negroes ‘semi-barbarous,’ you may do so; but you are bearing false witness against your neighbor.

“My dear friend,” said I, “sum up all the evils of the laboring classes, of foreigners and the lower orders of society.  Take their miseries, vices, crimes, with all the blessings of freedom and everything else.  Get the proportion of evil to the good.  Remember that these classes will continue to exist among us.  Then take the slaves, the lower order at the South, as foreigners are with us, and say if, on the whole, the proportion of evil among the slaves is any greater than among the corresponding classes elsewhere.  Do not be an optimist.  Acknowledge that society, in this fallen world, must have elements of evil, by reason at least of imbecility, want of thrift, misfortune, and other things.  You will not fail to see that slavery with all its evils is, under the circumstances, by no means, the worst possible condition for the colored people.”

“Well,” said he, “I will think of all you have said.  I do not wish to be an ultraist, nor to shut my eyes against truth.  You will wish to go to bed; there are some further points on which I would know your views, and we will, if you please, resume the subject to-morrow.”