The following passage is historically interesting: 

“The Yearly Meeting of Friends of North Carolina have sent several hundreds of those they have had under their care to Liberia, for whose emancipation in this State they could never obtain a law, though they petitioned for it oftentimes for the space of fifty years, always finding the chief objection of the legislature to be that of the great number and degraded and low character of the free persons of color already in the State.  We prefer sending them to Africa rather than to any of the free States or to Canada—­because we believe that is their proper home.  We sent some to the State of Ohio; and since then hundreds of blacks have been in a manner compelled, by the laws of that State, or the prejudices of some of its citizens, to leave it and go to Canada.  We have sent some to Indiana, but that State has passed laws, we hear, to prevent any more coming.  We have sent some to Pennsylvania, but, about two years ago, we shipped near one hundred from Newbern and Beaufort to Chester; they were not suffered to land, neither there nor at Philadelphia, nor yet on the Jersey shore opposite, but had to float on the Delaware river until the Colonization Society took them into possession; then they were landed in Jersey, ten miles below Philadelphia, and re-shipped for Africa.  North Carolina Yearly Meeting has contributed thousands of dollars to the Colonization Society; it has probably done more for it than any other religious community has in America, not merely because it has provided us an asylum for the people of color under our care, but upon the ground of our belief that it is a great, humane, and benevolent institution.  I am not informed of a single member of the Society of Friends in this country, not even in any of the slave States, who is not in favor of colonizing them in Africa.  We believe generally that colonizing them there gradually is the most likely way to put a peaceful end to slavery, and place them in the great scale of equality with the rest of the civilized world.”

I have devoted a space to this letter for several reasons; first, because the writer is a man of note and influence in his own country, and has plainly uttered what many of the Society of Friends even now feel, secondly, he has shown what was the prevalent sentiment among Friends not longer than seven years since, though I hope and believe a considerable change has taken place in the interval; and lastly, because, within a few months past, a well-known American, a zealous agent of the Colonization Society, has privately employed this very letter to induce abolitionists in England to look favorably on that Society.

I would add, also, that I learn, on the authority of an English “Friend,” who has lately visited the various Yearly Meetings in America, that in those parts of the slave States in which “Friends” chiefly reside, their influence is very perceptible in mitigating the treatment of the slaves in their neighborhood.  This, I willingly believe; indeed the example of a body who refuse to hold slaves, cannot but be highly beneficial.