The people who most frequently excite my commiseration are the free blacks.  They are “scattered and peeled.”  The Free States dread their coming; they cannot rise in the Slave States.  Even the slaves look down upon them, sometimes.  “Who are you?” said a slave to a free black, in my hearing; “you don’t belong to anybody!” Some States have given them notice to quit, within a specified time, or they must be sold.  Some here insist that slavery is the only proper condition for the blacks, and they would reduce them back to bondage.  Others remonstrate at this as cruel.  Surely it is a choice of evils for them, to be free, or to be slaves, if they remain here.  There is one thought that affords a ray of consolation,—­they are better off, in either condition, than they once were in Africa.  It is unquestionable to my mind that their relation to the whites, even in bondage, is, as the general rule, mercy to them, while they are on the same soil with the whites.  Allow it to be theoretically wrong to be a slave,—­it is, under existing circumstances, protection and a blessing, compared with any arrangement which has yet been proposed.  I have not sufficient patience to argue with those, North or South, who contend for slavery as a normal condition.  I should be called at the North “pro-slavery;” but the North is in a passion on this subject.  I am not, and I never can be, an advocate for this relation, in itself, but as a present necessity.

I once heard a speaker at an anti-slavery meeting at home say, “They tell us how elevated the blacks are, how intelligent, how pious; that shows how fit they are for freedom, how wrong it is to hold such people in bondage.  As much as you raise the slaves in our opinion, you deepen the guilt of the slave-holder.”

This used to dwell much on my mind.  I see the thing differently now.  You remember your Uncle Enoch, from Madras, who made your first Malay kite.  I remember a fable which he told you when he was flying the kite for the first time.  “A kite,” he said, “high in the air, reasoned thus:  If, notwithstanding this string, I fly so high, what would I not do, if I could break away!  It gave a dash and became free, and was soon in the woods.”  I do not mean to strain the comparison; but, certainly, a string has raised, and now keeps up, the colored race, here.  How they would do, if the string were cut, let wiser heads than mine decide.  They cannot have my scissors, at present.

The way to be friends of the slave, I now see, is to be the real friends of their masters, and to pray that the influences of truth and love may fill their hearts.  Where this is the case, the slaves, as a laboring class, are better off than any separate class of laboring people on earth, both for this world and the next.