r
assenting nor dissenting, in what you may finally decide to do.

Very respectfully,

Your obedient servant,

F.H. Elmore."

[This letter of Mr. Elmore contains but little more than a reiteration
of alarming cries on the part of the slaveholder;--cries that are as old
as the earliest attempts of philanthropy to break the fetters of the
enslaved, and that have been repeated up to the present day, with a
boldness that seems to increase, as instances of emancipation multiply
to prove them groundless. Those who utter them seem, in their panic, not
only to overlook the most obvious laws of the human mind, and the lights
of experience, but to be almost unconscious of the great events
connected with slavery, that are now passing around them in the world,
and conspiring to bring about its early abrogation among all civilized
and commercial nations.

However _Christian, and civilized, industrious, prosperous and happy_,
the SLAVEHOLDERS of the South may be, this cannot be said of the SLAVES.
A large religious denomination of the state in which Mr. Elmore resides,
has deliberately pronounced them to be "HEATHEN." _Their_ "industry" is
seen at the end of the lash--of "prosperity" they have none, for they
cannot possess any thing that is an element of prosperity--their
"happiness" they prove, by running away from their masters, whenever
they think they can effect their escape. This is the condition of a
large _majority_ of the people in South Carolina, Mississippi and
Louisiana.

The "two races" exist in peace in Mexico,--in all the former South
American dependencies of Spain, in Antigua, in the Bermudas, in Canada,
in Massachusetts, in Vermont, in fine, in every country where they enjoy
_legal equality_. It is the _denial_ of this that produces discontent.
MEN will never be satisfied without it. Let the slaveholders consult the
irreversible laws of the human mind--make a full concession of right to
those from whom they have withheld it, and they will be blessed with a
peace, political, social, moral, beyond their present conceptions;
without such concessions they never can possess it.

A system that cannot withstand the assaults of truth--that replies to
arguments with threats--that cannot be "talked about"--that flourishes
in secrecy and darkness, and dies when brought forth into the light and
examined, must in this time of inexorable scrutiny and relentless
agitation, be a dangerous one. If _justice_ be