egon and Kansas. Now we
cherish them, and their interests are ours.

"Two distinct races," said she, "never have been able to live together
unless one was subordinate and dependent. This, you know, all history
teaches. Your fanatics say it should not be so; they talk about liberty,
equality, and fraternity, and put guns and pikes into the hands of the
inferior race, here, to help them 'rise in the scale of being,' as they
term it. What God means to accomplish in this matter of slavery I do not
see.

"Suppose, merely for illustration," said she, "that cotton should be
superseded. Vast numbers of our slaves might then be useless here. What
would become of them? We should implore the North to relieve us of them,
in part. Then would rise up the Northern antipathy to the negro,
stronger, probably, in the abolitionist than in the pro-slavery man; and
as we sought to remove the negroes northward and westward, the Free
States would invoke the Supreme Court, and the Dred Scott decision, and
then we should see, with a witness, whether the black man has 'any
rights' on free soil 'which the' original settlers 'are bound to
respect.' Think of bleeding Kansas, even, refusing to incorporate
negro-suffrage in her constitution, when left free to follow the
dictates of common sense, and a wise self-interest. I sometimes think
that that one thing, as a philosophical fact, is worth all the trouble
which Kansas has cost. It cannot be 'unholy prejudice against color.' It
is human nature asserting the laws which God has established in it.

"I never," said she, "find abolitionists quoting the whole of the verse
which says: 'and hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth.'"

"What," said I, "do they leave out?"

"'And hath fixed the bounds of their habitations,' are some of the next
words," said she.

But you will tire of this. I will resume my story. I will only say that
I told the lady that some of my gentleman friends would call her a
strong-minded woman.

* * * * *

Your letter made me think of something which happened to a lady, a
fellow-traveller of ours, a few weeks, ago. She came here to visit a
lady whose husband owns one hundred and fifty slaves. The morning after
she reached the plantation, as she told me, she was awaked by the
cracking of whips. She listened; human voices, raised above the ordinary
pitch, were mingling with the sounds. She lay till she could endure it
no longer. Comi