“If this be true at all, it is true as regards the able-bodied hired man only.  But take into the account children and women, those, for example, that work naked in coal-mines, or wives whose sufferings from the brutal treatment of husbands daily fill the reports of police courts; take these into the reckoning, and the difference in the consequences of abused power will be very small.  The negro-slave is as thoroughly protected as any laborer in Europe.  He is protected from every other man’s wrong-doing by the ready interference of his master; he is guarded from the master’s abuse by the laws of the land, and a vigilant, earnest public opinion.  Let all cruelty be punished; let all abuse of power be restrained; but to abolish the relation of master and slave, because there are bad masters and ill-treated slaves, would not be a whit wiser than to abolish marriage, because there are brutal husbands and murdered wives.

“Yet, surely, it will be said, it must be admitted, after all, that slavery is an evil.  Yes, certainly, it is an evil; but in the same sense only in which servitude or hired labor is an evil.  To gain one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow, is a curse.  But it is a curse attended with a blessing.  It is an evil that shuts out a greater evil.  Labor for wages, labor for subsistence, and subjection to the authority of employer or master, are the conditions on which alone the laboring masses, white or black, can live with advantage to themselves and to society.”—­De Bow’s Review, Jan. 1860, pp. 56, 57.

Mr. North asked if I did not think that the colored people should be assisted in their efforts to get an education.

“There are collegiate institutions,” I told him, “for colored people, in Oxford, Pa., and in Xenia, O. With great sorrow have I observed, that applications to aid these institutions and to endow others for similar purposes have been received with coldness and distrust by many who could have made liberal contributions, for no other reason than the suspicion that they were designed by Abolitionists to thrust forward the colored man in an offensive manner.  I have known the name of a leading Abolitionist to be the death of a subscription-paper for such an institution.  This was a bitter prejudice.  When philanthropy with regard to the colored race among us falls into its natural channel, we shall see the South and the North opening wide the doors of usefulness in every department for which the colored people shall, any of them, manifest an aptitude.  The idea that this race is to be debarred from any and every development of which it is capable, is not entertained by any respectable people at the South.  The negro at the South is not doomed, by the Christian people, to an inexorable fate.  They will help him rise as fast and as far as God, in his providence, shows it to be his will to employ any or all of that race in other ways than those of servitude.