by our colonial sugars.  But it will not be long before we shall be informed on this point:  by an act which we cannot but applaud, and which continues the work it has undertaken, the French government has just suppressed the protection continued hitherto to our planters.  If, ere long, as it is justifiable to hope, they are delivered from the charges of the colonial system, whose advantages they have lost, we shall see them struggle, and successfully, I am convinced, against the Spanish sugars produced by slave labor.

It will be, perhaps, maintained, that the antipathy of race is stronger in the United States than elsewhere, and that the Americans, in this respect, are inferior to the English.  I am as conscious as any one else of those infamous proceedings towards free negroes which are the crime of the North, a crime no less odious than that of the South.  What conscience is not aroused at the thought of those prejudices of skin which do not permit blacks to sit by the side of whites, in schools, churches, or public vehicles?  Only the other day, nothing less than a denunciation in open parliament was needed to begin the destruction, by a public rebuke, of the classification which is being made on the English steamers themselves between Liverpool and New York.  There are some new States which purely and simply exclude free negroes from their Territory; those which do not exclude them from the Territory, repulse them from the ballot-box.  The injustice, in fine, is as gross, as crying, as it is possible to imagine.

Must we conclude from this that the coexistence of races, possible elsewhere, is impossible in the United States?  I distrust those sweeping assertions which resolve problems at one stroke; I refuse, above all, to admit so easily that iniquity must be maintained for the sole reason that it exists, and that it suffices to say:  “I am thus made; what would you have?  I cannot change myself,” to abstract one’s self from the accomplishment of the most elementary duty.  To endure negroes at one’s side, to respect their independence, to abstain from wrongs towards them, to consent to the full exercise of their rights, is an elementary duty; Christian duty, I need not say, demands something better.

Does this mean that we are to set ourselves up as judges, and brand as wretches all those who thus mistake the laws of charity and justice?  I fear much that, in their place, we would do precisely as they.  Living in the South, we would have slaves, and would defend slavery to the last; living in the North, we would tread under foot the free colored class.  Is there then neither the true, nor the false, nor justice, nor injustice?  God forbid!  The just and the true remain; iniquity should be condemned without pity; but we are bound to be more indulgent towards men than, towards things.  We are bound to remember that the influence of surroundings is enormous, and that, if crimes are always without excuse, there are many excusable criminals.  When we examine