“‘I think,’ said a planter, ’that if pity is due from one to the other, the South owes the larger debt to the North.  There needs to be a great reformation, namely, The Gradual Emancipation of the Northern Mind from “Anti-slavery” Error.’

“‘Our English friends, in their zeal against American slavery,’ said a young lawyer, ’seem to forget that the English government, at the Peace of Utrecht, agreed to furnish Spain with four thousand negroes annually for thirty years.’

“‘Poor human nature!’ said the Judge.  ’What should we all do, if we had not the sins of others to repent of and bewail?’

“There was a strong friend of temperance in the company from a north-western state.  Travelling in the South for pleasure, some time ago, he was immediately struck with the comparative absence of intemperance among the slaves.  On learning that the laws forbid the sale of intoxicating drink to them, and thinking of four millions of people in this land as delivered, in a great degree, from the curse of drunkenness, he says that he exclaimed:  ’Pretty well for the “sum of all villanies.”  The class of people in the United States best defended against drunkenness are the slaves!’ Some admonished him that the slaves did get liquor, and that white men ventured to tempt them.  ’I don’t care for that,’ said he; ’of course, there are exceptions; the “sum of all villanies” is a Temperance Society!’

“A Northern gentleman, travelling through the South, said, ’As to the feelings of the North respecting a possible insurrection, I am satisfied, since visiting in different parts of the South, that a very common apprehension with us, respecting your liability to trouble from this source, is exaggerated by fancy.

“’We have a theoretical idea that you must be dwelling, as we commonly hear it said, with a volcano under your feet.  Very many regard your slaves as a race of noble spirits, conscious of wrong, and burning with suppressed indignation, which is ready to break out at every chance.  They think of you at the North as having guns and pistols and spears all about you, ready for use at any moment.  But when I spend a night at your plantations, the owner and I the only white males, the wife and seven or eight young children having us for their only defenders against the seventy or hundred blacks, who are all about us in the quarters, the idea of danger has really never occurred to me; because my knowledge of the people has previously disarmed me of fear.’

“‘Emissaries, white and black,’ said a planter, ’can, make us trouble; but my belief is that we could live here to the end of time with these colored people, and be subject to fewer cases of insubordination by far than your corporations at the North suffer from in strikes.  Your people, generally, have no proper idea of the black man’s nature.  God seems to have given him docility and gentleness, that he may be a slave till the time comes for him to be something else.  So He has