ce in
point of "national morality" between the discretionary power residing in
your government to open any letter in the public post office, and a
well-defined and limited law to prevent the circulation of certain
specified incendiary writings by means of the United States mail.

Having now referred to every thing like argument on the subject of
slavery, that is worthy of notice in your letter, permit me to remark on
its tone and style, and very extraordinary bearing upon other
institutions of this country. You commence by addressing certain classes
of our people, as belonging to "a nation whose character is _now so low_
in the estimation of the civilized world;" and throughout you maintain
this tone. Did the Americans who were "under your roof last summer"
inform you that such language would be gratifying to their
fellow-citizens "having no practical concern with slaveholding?" Or do
the infamous libels on America, which you read in our abolition papers,
induce you to believe that all that class of people are, like the
abolitionists themselves, totally destitute of patriotism or pride of
country? Let me tell you that you are grossly deceived. And although
your stock-brokers and other speculators, who have been bitten in
American ventures, may have raised a stunning "cry" against us in
England, there is a vast body of people here besides slaveholders, who
justly

"Deem their own land of every land the pride,
Beloved by heaven o'er all the world beside,"

and who _know_ that at this moment we rank among the first powers of the
world--a position which we not only claim, but are always ready and able
to maintain.

The style you assume in addressing your Northern friends, is in perfect
keeping with your apparent estimation of them. Though I should be the
last, perhaps, to criticise mere style, I could not but be struck with
the extremely simple manner of your letter. You seem to have thought you
were writing a tract for benighted heathen, and telling wonders never
before suggested to their imagination, and so far above their untutored
comprehension as to require to be related in the primitive language of
"the child's own book." This is sufficiently amusing; and would be more
so, but for the coarse and bitter epithets you continually apply to the
poor slaveholders--epithets which appear to be stereotyped for the use
of abolitionists, and which form a large and material part of all their
arguments.