heads, if one did not
see (as one cannot help seeing in the country) that their
enfranchisement is a mere party trick to get votes. Being at the
Penitentiary the other day (this, while we mention votes), and looking
over the books, I noticed that almost every man had been 'pardoned' a
day or two before his time was up. Why? Because, if he had served his
time out, he would have been _ipso facto_ disfranchised. So, this form
of pardon is gone through to save his vote; and as every officer of the
prison holds his place only in right of his party, of course his hopeful
clients vote for the party that has let them out! When I read in Mr.
Beecher's church at Brooklyn, we found the trustees had suppressed the
fact that a certain upper gallery holding 150 was 'the Coloured
Gallery,' On the first night not a soul could be induced to enter it;
and it was not until it became known next day that I was certainly not
going to read there more than four times, that we managed to fill it.
One night at New York, on our second or third row, there were two
well-dressed women with a tinge of colour--I should say, not even
quadroons. But the holder of one ticket who found his seat to be next
them, demanded of Dolby 'what he meant by fixing him next to those two
Gord darmed cusses of niggers?' and insisted on being supplied with
another good place. Dolby firmly replied that he was perfectly certain
Mr. Dickens would not recognize such an objection on any account, but he
could have his money back, if he chose. Which, after some squabbling, he
had. In a comic scene in the New York Circus one night, when I was
looking on, four white people sat down upon a form in a barber's shop to
be shaved. A coloured man came as the fifth customer, and the four
immediately ran away. This was much laughed at and applauded. In the
Baltimore Penitentiary, the white prisoners dine on one side of the
room, the coloured prisoners on the other; and no one has the slightest
idea of mixing them. But it is indubitably the fact that exhalations
not the most agreeable arise from a number of coloured people got
together, and I was obliged to beat a quick retreat from their
dormitory. I strongly believe that they will die out of this country
fast. It seems, looking at them, so manifestly absurd to suppose it
possible that they can ever hold their own against a restless, shifty,
striving, stronger race."

On the fourth of February he wrote from Washington. "You may like to