North, "more
easily at the South than here."
"When you have served on the grand jury a few terms," said I, "you will
be more charitable toward Southerners. Human nature is the same
everywhere. It makes, where it does not find, occasion for sin.
"Now you will not understand, in all that I have said, that I am
pleading for slavery, that I desire to have this abject race among us,
that Southerners are purer and better than we. We are both under sin. We
all have our temptations and trials; each form of society has its own
kind of facilities for evil; but the grace of God and all the influences
which bear on the formation and the preservation of character, are the
same wherever Christianity prevails."
"Well, after all," said he, "it must be a semi-barbarous state of
society, where such a system is maintained."
"I shall have to send you," said I, "to the 'Hotel des Incurables.' I
think that your judgments are more than semi-barbarous. If you please to
term even the Southern negroes 'semi-barbarous,' you may do so; but you
are bearing false witness against your neighbor.
"My dear friend," said I, "sum up all the evils of the laboring classes,
of foreigners and the lower orders of society.
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