This, it is true, is a
great demand upon a Northerner."
"But oh," said he, (we happening to be alone just then,) "the cruelty of
compelling virtuous people, members of Churches, to commit sin, under
pain of being sold."
"Mr. North," said I, "how do you dare to open your lips on that
subject,--you, with myself, a member of a denomination in which men,
eminent in our pulpits, have--so many of them of late years--fallen. One
would think that we would never cast a stone at the South on that
subject.
"Some among us seem to think that the power and the opportunity to
commit sin must necessarily be followed by criminal indulgence. They do
themselves no credit in this supposition. They also leave out of view a
natural antipathy which must be overcome, sense of degradation,
probability of detection, loss of character, conscience, and all the
moral restraints which are common to men everywhere; and they only judge
that all who exercise authority over an abject race must, as a general
thing, be polluted.
"As to opportunities for evil-doing at the South compared with the
North, no one who walks the streets of a Northern city, by day or night,
with the ordinary discernment of one who sets himself to examine the
moral condition of a place, will fail to see that we need not go to the
South to find humiliating proofs of baseness and shame.
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