“‘Please, sir,’ said I, ’let me hear what you think is ’very considerably’ the sentiment at the North on this subject of insurrection.’

“‘I presume sir,’ said he, ’if the slaves should, some night, take possession of us, and demand a universal manumission, and we should refuse, and fire and sword and pillage and all manner of violence should ensue, and our persons and property should be at their will, vast multitudes of your people, including clergymen, would exclaim that the day of God’s righteous vengeance had come, and they would say, Amen.’

“‘So we interpret Thomas Jefferson’s idea,’ said I.

“‘I think, Sir,’ said he, ’that very many reasonable people of the North are of opinion that all the attributes of God are against any such procedure.

“’In the large sense in which nations speak to each other when they are asserting their rights, there is no objection to the first clause in the Declaration of Independence; but when you come to the people of a state, and one portion of that people rise and assert their right to break up the constitution of things under which they live, there is no more pertinency in that clause in the Declaration than there would be in giving us the reason for a revolution that all men are not far from five or six feet high.  What they say may be true in the abstract, but it does not prove that men, having come into a state of society, involuntarily, if you please, have all the freedom and equality which they would have, if they were each an independent savage in the wilderness.  Society is God’s ordinance, not a compact.  We have, all of us, lost some of our freedom and equality in the social state; now how far is it right that the blacks, being here, no matter how or why, should lose some of theirs? and how far is it right that we should take and keep some of it from them, whether for the good of all concerned, or for the good of ourselves, their civil superiors?—­whose welfare, it may be observed, will continually affect theirs.’

“The Judge said that he believed that God had, in his mysterious providence, and of his sovereign pleasure, making use of the cupidity of white men, placed these blacks here in connection with us for their good as a race, and for the welfare of the world.  He said that his mind could feel no peace on the subject of slavery, unless he viewed it in this light.  In connection with the great industrial and commercial interests of our globe, and as an indispensable element in the supply of human wants, this abject race had been transported from their savage life in Africa, and had been made immensely useful to the whole civilized world.  ‘We agree, as I have said,’ he continued, ’as to the immorality of those who brought them here; but he is not fit to reason on this subject, being destitute of all proper notions with regard to divine providence, who does not see in the results of slavery, both as to the civilized world and to negroes themselves, a wise, benevolent,