oducts; and,
worse still, under the Reciprocity Treaty, they must also become growers
of provisions for the planters who continue to hold their brothers,
sisters, wives and children, in bondage.

These are the practical results of the policy of the abolitionists.
Verily, they, also, have dug their ditches on the wrong side of their
breastworks, and afforded the enemy an easy entrance into their
fortress. But, "Let them alone; they be blind leaders of the blind. And
if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch."[84]

But we are not yet prepared to estimate the full extent of the
influence, for ill, exerted by the free colored people upon public
sentiment. The picture of their degraded moral condition, drawn by the
abolitionists, is a dark one indeed, and calculated to do but little
toward promoting emancipation, or in placing themselves in a position of
equality with the whites. According to their testimony, the condition of
the slave, under the restraints of Christian masters, must be vastly
more favorable to moral progress, than that of the majority of those who
have received their freedom. While they have all the animal appetites
and passions fully developed, they seem to remain, intellectually,
child-like, with neither the courage nor the foresight enabling them to
seize upon fields of enterprise that would lead to wealth and fame. Look
at the facts upon this point. They were offered a home and government of
their own in Africa, with the control of extensive tropical cultivation;
but they rejected the boon, and refused to leave the land of their
birth, in the vain belief that they could, by remaining here, assist in
wrenching the chains from the slaves of the South. They expected great
aid, too, in their work, from the moral effect of West Indian
emancipation; but that has failed in the results anticipated, and the
free colored laborer is about to be superseded there by imported coolie
labor from abroad. They expected, also, that the emigrants and fugitives
to Canada, rising into respectability under British laws, would do the
race much honor, and show the value of emancipation; but even there the
hope has not been realized, and it will be no uncommon thing should the
Government set its face against them as most unwelcome visitors. A few
scraps of history will be of service, in illustrating the feeling of the
subjects of the British North American colonies, in relation to the
inroads made upon them by