ood for nothing! They can not
help themselves! They are so helpless they can not even pick up a
needle. And my boys! These niggers are ruining my boys! My boys won't
work!" And then he would _go_ on to tell the nameless vices the young
men of the city were drawn into through their intimacy with the blacks.
I thought, but did not say, "My dear sir, if slavery is working such a
ruin on your own children, would not the abolitionists be doing you a
kindness if they would steal every nigger you have got?"

But there was a still graver aspect that this question was beginning to
assume: A woman that is a slave has neither the motive nor the power to
protect her own virtue; and the land was threatened to be filled with a
nation of mulattoes. But this mixed race would possess all the pride,
ambition and talent of the superior race; at the same time they would
feel all that undying hatred that a subject people feel toward the men
by whom they are subjugated. We would then be sleeping on a volcano,
such as may at any hour engulf the empire of Russia.

All this I pondered in my heart as I slowly made my way toward St.
Joseph, on the Missouri River, which flows along the western border of
Kansas. And now this question was coming to the front and forcing a
settlement, and in Kansas would be the first real conflict. In Congress
they had only paltried with, it; now the people were to try their hand.
And what should I do? Had I any right as a Christian and as an American
citizen, when providentially called to this work, to withdraw myself
from aiding in its settlement? And should I turn my horse in the
opposite direction, go back to my Bro. Graves at Chillicothe, and say to
him: "You are a man of undoubted courage, but I am a paltroon and a
coward, and I am going to hunt a hole and hide myself, where I will be
out of danger when this battle is fought between freedom and slavery."

I did not turn back, but revolving all these matters in my mind, reached
the city of St. Joseph. Here I had been commended by a friend to a
merchant in the city, a member of the Christian Church. He received me
kindly and treated me courteously, but his partner in business did not
seem to be of that mind. He was all out of sorts, and gruffly said,
"Kansas is a humbug. It will not be settled in thirty years."

In revolutions men live fast. I had been ten days on my journey, and the
man that now crossed the Missouri River at St. Joseph was not just the
man th