to have the abuses of irresponsible power among them compared with abuses, discomforts, disadvantages elsewhere.  Grant that an owner may abuse his liberty; ownership leads to more of care and protection than of abuse and cruelty.  The slaves are here; the question is not, What would be the best possible condition for these people under the sun, but, What is best for them, being on this soil.  “Set them all free,” is the answer of some.  Half the ministers at the North every Sabbath pray for the slaves thus:  “Break every yoke; let the oppressed go free.”  If this means, Give the slaves their liberty, this would be their most direful calamity; they would be chased away from every free state, in process of time, and the Dred Scott decision would be invoked, even in Massachusetts, by its present most bitter opposers, and in its most misrepresented forms, as a defence of the American white race against the blacks.  “Set them free and hire them!” is the reply of others.  This, among other effects, would make them a far more degraded people than they now are.  Slavery keeps them identified with the whites; they are more respectable and respected by far, in this relation, than they can be, in the circumstances of the case, if they are detached from the whites.  There is no expression which conveys a more absolute error than this, and we often meet with it:  “He ceased to be a slave, and became a man.”  I read lately the report of a lecture at the North, by an eminent gentleman, of great moral worth, and highly respected.  He said, “A man cannot be, voluntarily, a slave, without having his manhood crushed out of him.”  That might be true in our case; but having seen manhood forced into benighted natures here, and splendid specimens of man as the result, I was, by this remark, reminded again of the delusiveness which there is sometimes in the best of logic.  You gave us a good specimen in your admirable illustration of no water in the moon.  A comparison of the slaves with the free negroes of the North, and in Canada, and with the free colored population in some of the Slave States, will satisfy any impartial spectator that manhood is full as conspicuous in the slaves, as a body, as in the free negroes.

Here are two extracts from Northern papers, which, true or false, awaken compassion in every human bosom toward the free colored people.  Indeed, allowing these statements, so unfavorable to them, to be mostly false, it reveals the antipathy of the white to the colored race when the blacks come to seek equality with the whites.  Let these free blacks be mixed up in large proportions with society in England and Scotland, and if Canadians feel as they are here represented, we may be sure that the present tone of the British people with regard to American slavery and the blacks, would also be modified.  But here are the extracts:—­