wide the doors of usefulness in
every department for which the colored people shall, any of them,
manifest an aptitude. The idea that this race is to be debarred from any
and every development of which it is capable, is not entertained by any
respectable people at the South. The negro at the South is not doomed,
by the Christian people, to an inexorable fate. They will help him rise
as fast and as far as God, in his providence, shows it to be his will to
employ any or all of that race in other ways than those of servitude.

"'If American slavery,' says one, 'be the horrid system of cruelty,
ignorance, and wickedness represented by some writers of fiction and
paid defamers of our institutions, how happens it that those who have
been reared in the midst of it, when freed and planted in Africa at
once exhibit such capacity for self-government and self-education, and
set such examples of good morals?

"'Have the negroes under British care at Sierra Leone made similar
progress in improvement? Do the free colored subjects of Britain in the
West Indies show the capacity, industry, and intelligence manifested by
the Liberians, whose training was in the school of American servitude?
Nor have the best specimens of this tutelage been sent out. Thousands
and tens of thousands of colored servants in the Southern States are
church-members, instructed in their duties by faithful Christian
teachers, and the children are trained in the fear and love of God.'--I
then observed,

"I have come to this conclusion: if Southern Christians say to us, as
they do, Auction-blocks, separation of families, and similar features of
slavery, in the limited and decreasing extent to which they prevail, are
as odious to us as to you;--we tolerate these things as parts of a
system which we all feel to be an evil, and which we are constantly
striving to ameliorate;--I will leave the whole subject in their hands;
I will trust them in this as I would in anything and everything; I feel
absolved from all responsibility to God or to them with regard to the
matter."

"Pray tell me," said Mrs. North, "what is all this discussion about 'the
territories,' and keeping slavery out of them?"

"I told her that slavery, which fifteen States of the Union maintain as
a part of their domestic life, is, by many of the people in the Free
States, regarded as they regard the plague and death; they prescribe
certain degrees of latitude as barriers to it, as though they ena