they will assuredly never encounter.  The question is not alone one of foregoing great wealth, or the mere means of subsistence (in either case almost equally hard); it is not alone the unbinding the hands of those who have many a bloody debt of hatred and revenge to settle; it is not alone the consenting suddenly to see by their side, upon a footing of free social equality, creatures towards whom their predominant feeling is one of mingled terror and abhorrence, and who, during the whole of their national existence, have been, as the earth, trampled beneath their feet, yet ever threatening to gape and swallow them alive.  It is not all this alone which makes it unlikely that the Southern planter should desire to free his slaves:  freedom in America is not merely a personal right, it involves a political privilege.  Freemen there are legislators.  The rulers of the land are the majority of the people, and in many parts of the Southern States the black free citizens would become, if not at once, yet in process of time, inevitably voters, landholders, delegates to state legislatures, members of assembly—­who knows?—­senators, judges, aspirants to the presidency of the United States.  You must be an American, or have lived long among them, to conceive the shout of derisive execration with which such an idea would be hailed from one end of the land to the other.

That the emancipation of the negroes need not necessarily put them in possession of the franchise is of course obvious, but as a general consequence the one would follow from the other; and at present certainly the slaveholders are no more ready to grant the political privilege than the natural right of freedom.  Under these circumstances, though the utmost commiseration is naturally excited by the slaves, I agree with you that some forbearance is due to the masters.  It is difficult to conceive a more awful position than theirs:  fettered by laws which impede every movement towards right and justice, and utterly without the desire to repeal them—­dogged by the apprehension of nameless retributions—­bound beneath a burthen of responsibility for which, whether they acknowledge it or not, they are held accountable by God and men—­goaded by the keen consciousness of the growing reprobation of all civilised Christian communities, their existence presents the miserable moral counterpart of the physical condition of their slaves; and it is one compared with which that of the wretchedest slave is, in my judgement, worthy of envy.

* * * * *

Letter to C.G., Esq.

Before entering upon my answer to your questions, let me state that I have no claim to be ranked as an abolitionist in the American acceptation of the word, for I have hitherto held the emancipation of the slaves to be exclusively the business and duty of their owners, whose highest moral interest I thought it was to rid themselves of such a responsibility, in spite of the manifold worldly interests almost inextricably bound up with it.