Madam, excuse me," said Theophilus; "but I cannot help being
reminded of what an English reviewer once said,--that a lady's facts
have as much poetry in them as Tom Moore's lyrics. Of course poetry is
always agreeable, even though of no statistical value."

"I see no poetry in my facts," said Mrs. Crowfield. "Is not slavery
forever abolished, by the confession of its best friends,--even of those
who declare its abolition a misfortune, and themselves ruined in
consequence?"

"I confess, my dear Madam, that we have succeeded as we human creatures
commonly do, in supposing that we have destroyed an evil, when we have
only changed its name. We have contrived to withdraw from the slave just
that fiction of property relation which made it for the interest of some
one to care for him a little, however imperfectly; and having destroyed
that, we turn him out defenceless to shift for himself in a community
every member of which is embittered against him. The whole South
resounds with the outcries of slaves suffering the vindictive wrath of
former masters; laws are being passed hunting them out of this State and
out of that; the animosity of race--at all times the most bitter and
unreasonable of animosities--is being aroused all over the land. And the
Free States take the lead in injustice to them. Witness the late vote of
Connecticut on the suffrage question. The efforts of Government to
protect the rights of these poor defenceless creatures are about as
energetic as such efforts always have been and always will be while
human nature remains what it is. For a while the obvious rights of the
weaker party will be confessed, with some show of consideration, in
public speeches; they will be paraded by philanthropic sentimentalists,
to give point to their eloquence; they will be here and there sustained
in Governmental measures, when there is no strong temptation to the
contrary, and nothing better to be done; but the moment that political
combinations begin to be formed, all the rights and interests of this
helpless people will be bandied about, as so many makeweights in the
political scale. Any troublesome lion will have a negro thrown to him
to keep him quiet. All their hopes will be dashed to the ground by the
imperious Southern white, no longer feeling for them even the interest
of a master, and regarding them with a mixture of hatred and loathing as
the cause of all his reverses. Then, if, driven to despair, they seek to
defen