and enjoy that which gladdens every
Christian heart. If slavery be, necessarily, "the sum of all villanies,"
as you and many use the expression, the relation cannot exist without
making each slave-holder a villain, in all the degrees of villany. You
will do well to look into the cant phrases of "freedom," before you
indulge in the use of them. The bishops and clergy of the noble army of
Methodists in the South would not sustain their great chief in applying
the phrase in question to the actual state of things in the Southern
country. Wesley used those words concerning slavery in foreign colonies;
he had not seen it mixed up with society in England, as it is in the
South.

Taking the blacks as they are, and comparing them also with what they
would be in Africa, or if set free, to remain in connection with the
whites, slavery is not a curse. To be free is, of course, in itself a
blessing. But it depends on many things whether, under existing
circumstances, being a slave here is practically a curse. Our people
generally insist that it must be, and therefore that it is. Here they
are mistaken, as I now view the subject. The British people and the
French, looking at the blacks in a colony, settle the question of
emancipation in their own minds without much difficulty. But it would be
found to be a different thing to emancipate the colored race, to live
side by side with the English people in the mother-country. In that
case, a contest between the two races for the possession of power, and
innumerable offences and practical difficulties, would, in time, lead to
the extermination, or expatriation, of one of the two races, or to their
intermarriage, if the universal history of such conjunction of races is
any guide.

I do not wonder that the good lady with the "marsh-mallow" exclaimed so
at your groundless commiseration of the sick among the slaves. You have
no more idea of the practical relation between the whites and the
blacks, the owners and the slaves, than most of the English people, who
have never been here, have of our Federal and State relations.

I will tell you an incident which I know to be literally true.

A lady from a free state was visiting at the South. Calling upon a
married lady, a near relative of one who has been Vice-President of the
United States, she found her with a little sick black babe at her
breast.

The Northern lady started with astonishment. I am not informed whether
she was what is called