I am willing to confide this to men as
good as we, acting as they will on their responsibility to God. It may
be, that the system, stripped of everything which can be taken away,
will be perpetuated, for the best good of the slave and his master.
"But," said I, "while this perpetual relation of the black race to us is
possible, and may be the design of a benevolent God for our happiness
and that of the Africans, and while I love to use it in replying to
those who, with short-sighted and somewhat passionate reasoning, as I
think, contend that slavery must utterly be rooted out of the land, I
confess that my own thoughts turn to the Continent of Africa as the
great object for which an all-wise God has permitted slavery to exist on
our shores.
"I love to look at American slavery in connection with the future
history of that great African continent, containing one hundred and
fifty millions of people. History and discovered relics make the
Ethiopian race to be older even than Egypt. The once powerful nations of
Northern Africa, Numidia, Mauratania, as well as the Egyptian builders
of pyramids, have disappeared, or they exist only in a few Coptic
tribes; and even they are of doubtful origin.
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