to our body as tyrants themselves, by doing so much for the promotion of ignorance amongst us; for they, making such pretensions to knowledge, such of our youth as are seeking after knowledge, and can get access to them, take them as criterions to go by, who will lead them into a channel, where, unless the Lord blesses them with the privilege of seeing their error, they will be irretrievably lost forever, while in time!!

I must close this article by narrating the very heart-rending fact, that I have examined school-boys and young men of colour in different parts of the country, in the most simple parts of Murray’s English Grammar, and not more than one in thirty was able to give a correct answer to my interrogations.  If any one contradicts me, let him step out of his door into the streets of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, (no use to mention any other, for the Christians are too charitable further south or west!)—­I say, let him who disputes me, step out of his door into the streets of either of those four cities, and promiscuously collect one hundred school boys or young men of colour, who have been to school, and who are considered by the coloured people to have received an excellent education, because, perhaps, some of them can write a good hand, but who notwithstanding their neat writing, may be almost as ignorant, in comparison, as horses.  And, I say it, he will hardly find (in this enlightened day, and in the midst of this charitable people) five in one hundred, who are able to correct the false grammar of their language.  The cause of this almost universal ignorance amongst us, I appeal to our school-masters to declare.  Here is a fact, which I this very minute take from the mouth of a young coloured man, who has been to school in this state (Massachusetts) nearly nine years, and who knows grammar this day, nearly as well as he did the day he first entered the school-house, under a white master.  This young man says—­“My master would never allow me to study grammar.”—­I asked him why?  “The school committee,” said he, “forbid the colored children learning grammar—­they would not allow any but the white children to study grammar.”

It is a notorious fact that the major part of the white Americans have, ever since we have been among them, tried to keep us ignorant and make us believe that God made us and our children to be slaves to them and theirs. Oh! my God, have mercy on Christian Americans!!

FOOTNOTES: 

[10] Which is the reason the whites take the advantage of us.

[11] See his Notes on Virginia, page 213.

ARTICLE III.

OUR WRETCHEDNESS IN CONSEQUENCE OF THE PREACHERS OF THE RELIGION OF JESUS CHRIST.