or oftener, if the members
choose. In some parts, also, Sunday schools for blacks are established,
and Bible classes are orally instructed by discreet and pious persons.
Now where will you find a laboring population possessed of greater
religious advantages than these? Not in London, I am sure, where it is
known that your churches, chapels, and religions meeting-houses, of all
sorts, can not contain one-half of the inhabitants.

I have admitted, without hesitation, what it would be untrue and
profitless to deny, that slaveholders are responsible to the world for
the humane treatment of the fellow-beings whom God has placed in their
hands. I think it would be only fair for you to admit, what is equally
undeniable, that every man in independent circumstances, all the world
over, and every government, is to the same extent responsible to the
whole human family, for the condition of the poor and laboring classes
in their own country, and around them, wherever they may be placed, to
whom God has denied the advantages he has given themselves. If so, it
would naturally seem the duty of true humanity and rational philanthropy
to devote their time and labor, their thoughts, writings and charity,
first to the objects placed as it were under their own immediate charge.
And it must be regarded as a clear evasion and skillful neglect of this
cardinal duty, to pass from those whose destitute situation they can
plainly see, minutely examine, and efficiently relieve, to inquire after
the condition of others in no way intrusted to their care, to exaggerate
evils of which they can not be cognizant, to expend all their sympathies
and exhaust all their energies on these remote objects of their
unnatural, not to say dangerous, benevolence; and finally, to
calumniate, denounce, and endeavor to excite the indignation of the
world against their unoffending fellow-creatures for not hastening,
under their dictation, to redress wrongs which are stoutly and
truthfully denied, while they themselves go but little further in
alleviating those chargeable on them than openly and unblushingly to
acknowledge them. There may be indeed a sort of merit in doing so much
as to make such an acknowledgment, but it must be very modest if it
expects appreciation.

Now I affirm, that in Great Britain the poor and laboring classes of
your own race and color, not only your fellow-beings, but your
_fellow-citizens_, are more miserable and degraded, morally and
phy