to generation, without being permitted to
share its civilizing influences. It thus propagates barbarism from age
to age, till at last it involves both master and slave in a common ruin.
Freedom recruits the ranks of a nation's population from the homes of
the industrious, the frugal, the strong, the enlightened, the virtuous,
the religious; and leaves the ignorant, the superstitious, the indolent,
the improvident, the vicious, without an offspring, and without a name
in future generations. Freedom places society, by obeying the law of
propagation which God imposed on it, upon an ascending plane of
ever-increasing civilization; slavery, by a forced and unnatural law of
propagation, places it upon a descending plane of ever-deepening vice
and barbarism.

That dread of negro equality which is perpetually haunting the
imaginations of the American people, is, therefore, wholly without
foundation in any reality. It is a delusion, which has already driven
us, in a sort of madness, far on the road to ruin. It is, I fear, a
judicial blindness, which the all-wise and righteous Ruler of the
universe has sent upon us for the punishment of our sins. The negro does
not aspire to political or social equality with the white man. He has
evidently no such destiny, no such hope, no such possibility. He is
weak, and constantly becoming weaker; and nothing can ever make him
strong but our continued injustice and oppression. He appeals not to our
fears, but to our compassion. He asks not to rule us: he only craves of
us leave to toil; to hew our wood and draw our water, for such miserable
pittance of compensation as the competition of free labor will award
him--_a grave_. If we deny him this humble boon, we may expect no end to
our national convulsions but in dissolution. If we promptly grant it,
over all our national domain, we may expect the speedy return of peace,
and such prosperity as no nation ever before enjoyed.

WAS HE SUCCESSFUL?

'Do but grasp into the thick of human life! Every one _lives_
it--to not many is it _known_; and seize it where you will, it is
interesting.'--GOETHE.

SUCCESSFUL.--Terminating in accomplishing what is wished
or intended.'--WEBSTER'S _Dictionary_.

CHAPTER IV.

We go tack to look a little at the fortunes of the Meeker family.
Twenty-three years have passed since we introduced it to the reader, on
the occasion of Hiram's birth. Time has produced his usual tokens. Mr