All the rest of Mrs. Stowe’s horrors can be accounted for satisfactorily.  It is much better to try and find an excuse for one’s fellow-creatures than to be always calling them “story-tellers,” and the like.  I am determined to be charitable.

But still it is misrepresentation; for if they took proper means, they would find out the delusions under which they labor.

Abolitionists do not help their cause by misrepresentation.  It will do well enough, in a book of romance, to describe infants torn from the arms of their shrieking mothers, and sold for five and ten dollars.  It tells well, for the mass of readers are fond of horrors; but it is not true.  It is on a par with the fact stated, that masters advertise their slaves, and offer rewards for them, dead or alive.  How did the snows of New England ever give birth to such brilliant imaginations!

Family relations are generally respected; and when they are not, it is one of the evils attendant on an institution which God has permitted in all ages, for his inscrutable purposes, and which he may in his good time do away with.

The Jews ever turn their eyes and affections toward Jerusalem, as their home; so should the free colored people in America regard Liberia.  Africa, once their mother country, should, in its turn, be the country of their adoption.

As regards the standard of talent among negroes, I fancy it has been exaggerated; though no one can, at present, form a just conclusion.  Slavery has, for ages, pressed like a band of iron round the intellect of the colored man.  Time must do its work to show what he is, without a like hindrance.

The instance mentioned in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” of a young mulatto, George Harris, inventing a machine, is very solitary.  The negroes, like a good many of their owners, are opposed to innovations.  They like the good old way.  The hot sun under which they were born, and the hotter one that lighted the paths of their ancestors, prejudices them against any new effort.  I think, when they do get in Congress, they will vote for agricultural against manufacturing interests.  I am sure they would rather pick cotton than be confined to the din and dust of a factory.  An old negro prefers to put his meal bags in a covered wagon, and drive them to market at his leisure, with his pocket full of the tobacco he helped to raise, and the whole country for a spit-box, to being whirled away bodily in a railroad car, in terror of his life, deaf with the whistling and the puffing of the engine.  When Liberia or Africa does become a great nation, (Heaven grant it may soon,) they will require many other buildings there, before a patent office is called for.