“The slaves are not treated as hired horses are liable to be treated,” I replied.  “We know how a man is likely to treat his own horse, compared with the horse which he hires.  Men nurse their slaves when they are sick; they provide for them when they are old.  By their care and responsibility for them, and in relieving them from responsibility, they pay them wages whose market-value, if it could be reckoned in dollars, would be higher wages than are paid to the same class of laborers in the land.  There are not four millions of the lower class of the laboring people in any one district of the earth whose condition is to be compared with that of the Southern slaves for comfort and happiness.”

“I presume,” said Mrs. North, “that you would not regard exemption from responsibility as in itself a blessing.  You know how it educates us, how it sharpens the faculties, how it makes a man more of a man; therefore is it, after all, any kindness to the slaves, that they are relieved from responsibility?”

“I thank you,” said I, “for that question.  Does it concern us that our domestic servants are relieved, for the time, of all responsibility for house-rent, taxes, political duties?

“Every condition of poverty and toil has its peculiar hardships and sorrows.  But putting together, respectively, all the advantages and the disadvantages of our slaves, he who looks upon a population with enlarged views of liabilities and of the inevitable results in the working of different schemes of labor, and is not so weak or morbid as to dwell inordinately on real and imaginary wrongs and miseries, which, after all, if real, are compensated for by advantages or surpassed by aggregated smaller evils in other conditions, must admit that, the colored people being here, their being owned is the very best possible thing for their protection, and the surest guarantee against all their liabilities to want in hard times, sickness, and old age.

“Speaking of hard times leads me to say, that if you could put four millions of laboring people in the Free States, for a winter or during commercial distresses and the stagnation of every kind of business, in a position where, while they were still active and useful, a single thought or care about their sustenance would not visit them, you would be deemed a philanthropist and public benefactor.  There will not be the same number of people in the laboring class throughout our land next winter, in any one section, whose comfort and happiness will exceed that of our slaves.”

“Oh, well,” said Mr. North, “all this may be true, but this does not reconcile me to slavery.  Our horses here at the North will all be comfortably provided for, notwithstanding any money pressure.  But I would rather be a human being and fail, every winter, than be a horse.”