They ought not to be
so easily duped, so ready to believe evil, so quickly carried away by
partial representations, and so unwilling to take comprehensive views of
such a subject as this. I condemn myself in speaking thus; I partly
blame the novel-writers, and the editors of party papers, and political
leaders. But we ought at the North to understand this subject better,
to listen willingly to information from great and good men who have
spent their lives among the slaves, and to discriminate between the evil
and the good. The result may be that we shall not change our inbred
views, nor cease to dissent from those who advocate slavery as a
necessary means of civilization in its highest forms; but we shall
certainly differ from those who declare it to be, practically, an
unmitigated curse to all concerned. I am often made to wish that the
Southerners could be relieved of our Northern hostility and its effects
upon them, just to see them laboring, as they then would, to correct
certain evils which ought to be redressed. We are all apt to neglect our
duty, more or less, when we are suffering abuse.
Educate this people, some years longer, in the way in which they are
going on, and they cannot be slaves in any objectionable sense.
Pages:
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108