“I know that there are those that have great obstacles to overcome, but I think that while Southerners may have more personal likings for certain favorite servants, they have stronger prejudices than even we have, or if they have no more than we have, they have more self-restraint, and show it more virulently.”

“But I [think?] they do not seem to have any horror of personal contact.”

“Of course not; constant familiarity with the race has worn away all sense of physical repulsion but there is a prejudice which ought to be an American feeling; it is a prejudice against their rising in the scale of humanity.  A prejudice which virtually says you are down, and I mean to keep you down.  As a servant I tolerate you; you are useful as you are valuable, but rise one step in the scale of being, and I am ready to put you down.  I see this in the treatment that the free colored people receive in parts of the South; they seem to me to be the outcasts of an outcast race.  They are denied the right to walk in certain public places accessible to every class unless they go as nurses, and are forbidden to assemble in evening meetings, and forced to be in the house unless they have passes, by an early hour in the night, and in fact they are hampered or hemmed in on every side; subject to insults from any rude, coarse or brutal white, and in case of outrages, denied their testimony.  Prejudiced as we are in Pennsylvania, we do not go that far.”

“But, Josiah, we have much to blush for in Pennsylvania; colored people are denied the privilege of riding in our street cars.  Only last week when I was in Philadelphia I saw a very decent-looking colored woman with a child, who looked too feeble to walk, and the child too heavy for her to carry.  She beckoned to a conductor, but he swept by and took no more heed of her than if she had been a dog.  There was a young lady sitting in the car, who remarked to her mother, as a very filthy-looking white man entered, ’See, they will let that filthy creature ride and prohibit a decent respectable colored person!’ The mother quietly assented.

“From her dress I took her to be a Quakeress, for she had a lovely dress of dove-colored silk.  The young lady had scarcely uttered the words when a young man who sat next the mother deliberately arose, and beckoned to the man with the sooty clothes to take his seat; but fortunately for the Quakeress, a lady who was sitting next her daughter arose just at that moment, and left the seat, and the old man without noticing the manoeuvre passed over to the other side, and thus avoided the contact.  I was amused, however, about one thing; for the young man who gave up his seat was compelled to ride about a mile standing.”

“Served him right,” said Thomas Carpenter; “it was a very contemptible action, to attempt to punish the hardihood of the young lady by attempting to soil her mother’s dress; and yet little souls who feel a morbid satisfaction in trampling on the weak, always sink themselves in the scale of manhood.”