free.  In this you and your friends labor under a huge mistake, and it poisons all your views and feelings about slavery.  When you denounce slave-holders and slavery, and depict the condition of the slave in your awful colors, they at the South know that in hundreds of thousands of instances, as it regards masters and slaves, all that you say is practically false; you are carried away by your zeal against a theoretical wrong.

“Now suppose that instead of starting with the theoretical wrong and getting only such facts as illustrate it, you should travel through the South to pick up such letters as you consider this, respecting Kate, to be;—­what a pleasing view might be presented of the slaves’ condition in cases without number!”

“But,” said he, “there are terrible evils underlying these fair features of slavery.”

“True,” said I, “but why, in the name of truth and love do you never hear such a letter as this read on the platforms of Northern abolition societies?  What mingled groans and hisses and shrieks for freedom, and then what an emptying of the demoniacal epithets there would be, if such a letter should be offered.  One case of whipping would have more effect than a thousand such letters, in your assemblies and newspapers.  No one from the continent of Europe would infer from those meetings that such beings as Kate and her little babe, and this lady and her husband and father, existed even in fiction, but that slave-holders are Legrees, and the slaves their victims.  What a beautiful effect it would have on us and on the South, if touching tales of loving-kindness between masters and slaves, instances of perfect happiness in that relation, should be cited, and then you should enter your candid, but decided opposition to the system, to its extension, to its evils where it exists.  How soon we should all be found working together, so far as we might, for the amelioration of the colored race here, with a view to the extinction of slavery in every form of it in which it is an evil, or a greater evil than anything which might properly be substituted.”

“Well,” said Mrs. North, “husband, what do you say to that?”

“I like it,” said he.

“But now,” said I, “the language of the place of despair is exhausted in describing and denouncing the South.  If a man among us lifts up his voice to say good things about Southerners, one universal hiss goes up from all your conventions and anti-slavery prints.  He may be seeking the same end with you, namely, the peaceful removal of slavery, with due regard to the highest good of all concerned; but let him utter a word in arrest of your unqualified condemnation of slavery as it actually is, and there are no persecutors, nor scourges, nor intolerance on the earth, more fierce and cruel than you and your denunciations.”

“Take it patiently, husband,” said Mrs. North, “you know that you deserve it.”