did. Then I
pitied you, and I pitied myself for my own former ignorance, and I
pitied very many of our Northern people, and, not the least, such
persons as poor "Isaiah," who I know are honest, but are grievously
misled. The word slavery is, to us, an awful word. Very much of our
anti-slavery feeling is a perfectly natural instinct. You cannot see
Java sparrows in a cage, nor even a mother-hen tied to her coop, without
a lurking wish to give them liberty. On thinking of being "a slave," we
immediately make the case our own, and imagine what it would be for us
to be in bondage to the will of another. We cannot easily be convinced
that this is not exactly parallel with being one of the slaves at the
South, nor that to be a slave does not have these things for its
inseparable conditions, which, we imagine, are always obtruding their
direful visages; namely, "auction-block," "overseer," "whip,"
"chattelism," "separations," "down-trodden," "cattle." Hence it is easy
for orators and preachers to work on our sympathies. There are scattered
facts enough to justify any tale which any public speaker chooses to
relate. I confess that my respect for many of our Northern people has
not risen, as I see them from this point of view. They ought not to be
so easily duped, so ready to believe evil, so quickly carried away by
partial representations, and so unwilling to take comprehensive views of
such a subject as this. I condemn myself in speaking thus; I partly
blame the novel-writers, and the editors of party papers, and political
leaders. But we ought at the North to understand this subject better,
to listen willingly to information from great and good men who have
spent their lives among the slaves, and to discriminate between the evil
and the good. The result may be that we shall not change our inbred
views, nor cease to dissent from those who advocate slavery as a
necessary means of civilization in its highest forms; but we shall
certainly differ from those who declare it to be, practically, an
unmitigated curse to all concerned. I am often made to wish that the
Southerners could be relieved of our Northern hostility and its effects
upon them, just to see them laboring, as they then would, to correct
certain evils which ought to be redressed. We are all apt to neglect our
duty, more or less, when we are suffering abuse.

Educate this people, some years longer, in the way in which they are
going on, and they cannot be slaves in any