o a government at whose hands they receive nothing
but injustice.'_ In the language of the wise, prophetic
Jefferson, 'you must approach this subject, YOU MUST ADOPT SOME
PLAN OF EMANCIPATION, OR WORSE WILL FOLLOW.'"

In Maryland and Delaware the Quakers were rapidly emancipating their
slaves, and the strong reaction that had set in among the thoughtful
men of the South began to threaten the institution. Men felt that it
was a curse to the slave, and poisoned the best white society of the
slave-holding States. As early as 1781, Mr. Jefferson, with his keen,
philosophical insight, beheld with alarm the demoralizing tendency of
slavery. "The whole commerce," says Mr. Jefferson, "between master and
slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the
most unrelenting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission
on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it--for man
is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in
him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees
others do. If a parent could find no motive, either in his
philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of
passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that
his child is present. But generally, it is not sufficient. The parent
storms; the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on
the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose tongue to
the worst of passions, and, thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised
in tyranny, cannot but be stamped with odious peculiarities. The man
must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by
such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be
loaded, who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the
rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into
enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the _amor patriae_ of
the other!"[11]

And what was true in Virginia, as coming under the observation of Mr.
Jefferson, was true in all the other States where slavery existed. And
indeed it was difficult to tell whether the slave or master was
injured the more. The ignorance of the former veiled from him the
terrible evils of his condition, while the intelligence of the latter
revealed to him, in detail, the baleful effects of the institution
upon all who came within its area. It was at war with social order; it
contracted t