The mischievous influence of the Colonization Society is very extensive among professing Christians in Baltimore, and is paramount in the legislature of the State.

The American slave trade is carried on in the most open manner in this city.  We paid a visit to the establishment of an extensive slave dealer, a large new building in one of the principal streets.  The proprietor received us with great courtesy, and permitted us to inspect the premises.  Cleanliness and order were every where visible, and, might we judge from the specimens of food shewn us, the animal wants of the slaves are not neglected.  There were only five or six negroes in stock, but the proprietor told us he had sometimes three or four hundred there, and had shipped off a cargo to New Orleans a few days before.  That city is the market where the highest price is generally obtained for them.  The premises are strongly secured with bolts and bars, and the rooms in which the negroes are confined, surround an open court yard, where they are permitted to take the air.  We were accompanied and kindly introduced by an individual who has often been engaged in preventing negroes from being illegally enslaved; and the proprietor of the establishment expressed his approval of his efforts, and that when such cases come before himself in the way of trade, he was accustomed to send them to our friend for investigation; he added that slaves would often come to him, and ask him to purchase them, and that he was the means of transferring them from worse masters to better; that he never parted families, though of course he could not control their fate, either before they came into his hands, or after they left him.  He said he frequently left his concerns for weeks together, under the care of his head slave, whose wife he had made free, and promised the same boon to him, if he conducted himself well a few years longer.  I thought it right to intimate my view of the nature of slavery and the slave trade, and that I deemed it wholly inconsistent with the plain precept “do unto others as ye would they should do unto you.”  This he did not attempt to controvert, yet he stated in extenuation, that the law permitted the trade in slaves, though he should be as willing as any one to have the system abolished, if the State would grant them compensation for their property.  He farther said, that he was born in a slave State, that his mother had been for fifty years a member of the Wesleyan body, and that though he had not joined a Christian church himself, he had never sworn an oath, nor committed an immoral act in his life.  He also shewed, I think, convincingly, that dealing in slaves was not worse than slave holding.  On leaving the premises, we found the door of his office had been locked upon us during this conference.  I subsequently learned that this person, though living in considerable style, was not generally received in respectable society, and that a lady whom he had lately married, was shunned by her former acquaintance.  Such is the testimony of the slave-holders of Baltimore against slave dealing, by which they condemn themselves in the sight of God and man, and add the guilt of hypocrisy to their own sin.  Some time afterwards I addressed the following letter to this individual, which was published in many of the American papers: