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tical duties? "Every condition of poverty and toil has its peculiar hardships and sorrows. But putting together, respectively, all the advantages and the disadvantages of our slaves, he who looks upon a population with enlarged views of liabilities and of the inevitable results in the working of different schemes of labor, and is not so weak or morbid as to dwell inordinately on real and imaginary wrongs and miseries, which, after all, if real, are compensated for by advantages or surpassed by aggregated smaller evils in other conditions, must admit that, the colored people being here, their being owned is the very best possible thing for their protection, and the surest guarantee against all their liabilities to want in hard times, sickness, and old age. "Speaking of hard times leads me to say, that if you could put four millions of laboring people in the Free States, for a winter or during commercial distresses and the stagnation of every kind of business, in a position where, while they were still active and useful, a single thought or care about their sustenance would not visit them, you would be deemed a philanthropist and public benefactor. There will not be the same number of people in the laboring class throughout our land next winter, in any one section, whose comfort and happiness will exceed that of our slaves." "Oh, well," said Mr. North, "all this may be true, but this does not reconcile me to slavery. Our horses here at the North will all be comfortably provided for, notwithstanding any money pressure. But I would rather be a human being and fail, every winter, than be a horse." "Husband," said Mrs. North, "do you consider that a parallel case? Mr. C. is not arguing, as I understand him, that slavery is better than freedom. He is not persuading us to be slaves rather than free. He takes these four millions of blacks as he finds them, in bondage, and he asks, What shall we do with them? You say, Set them free. He says, They are better off, as a race, in their present bondage, than they would be if made free, to remain here. Not that they are better off than four millions of colored people, who had never been slaves, would be in a commonwealth by themselves." "I thank you, Mrs. North," said I, "for your clear and correct statement of my position. And now I will take up Mr. North's parable about the horses, and apply it justly. Let hay and grass be exceedingly scarce, and I had rather take my chance
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