Somebody
then is responsible for him as his guardian and provider, and is
amenable to the State for his sustenance. You can easily see that, let
the colored people come to be a hireling class, and their interests and
those of their masters are disjoined. There would be conflicts and
oppressions among themselves; they would fall into a degraded, serf-like
condition; but now each of them partakes of his master's interests, and
rises with him. I am not here pleading for slavery in the abstract, but,
the blacks being on the soil, it is far better for them to be owned than
to be free. Why are the Southwestern States, one after another, passing
laws, or framing their constitutions, to shut out from their borders
free negroes,--people in the very condition into which you would reduce
by wholesale all the blacks in the South? I pray you look and see that
you are an abstractionist, setting what you deem a theoretical wrong
against a practical good, and under the circumstances, a real mercy."
"But," said Mr. North, "slavery impoverishes the soil, makes the whites
shun labor, feeling it to be degrading, and it keeps the white children
from industrial pursuits, and"--
"Please stop," said I, "my dear Sir, and think of what you are saying,
and be not carried away by that popular flood of cant phrases.
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