stake, and it poisons all your
views and feelings about slavery. When you denounce slave-holders and
slavery, and depict the condition of the slave in your awful colors,
they at the South know that in hundreds of thousands of instances, as it
regards masters and slaves, all that you say is practically false; you
are carried away by your zeal against a theoretical wrong.

"Now suppose that instead of starting with the theoretical wrong and
getting only such facts as illustrate it, you should travel through the
South to pick up such letters as you consider this, respecting Kate, to
be;--what a pleasing view might be presented of the slaves' condition in
cases without number!"

"But," said he, "there are terrible evils underlying these fair features
of slavery."

"True," said I, "but why, in the name of truth and love do you never
hear such a letter as this read on the platforms of Northern abolition
societies? What mingled groans and hisses and shrieks for freedom, and
then what an emptying of the demoniacal epithets there would be, if such
a letter should be offered. One case of whipping would have more effect
than a thousand such letters, in your assemblies and newspapers. No one
from the continent of Europe would infer from those meetings that such
beings as Kate and her little babe, and this lady and her husband and
father, existed even in fiction, but that slave-holders are Legrees, and
the slaves their victims. What a beautiful effect it would have on us
and on the South, if touching tales of loving-kindness between masters
and slaves, instances of perfect happiness in that relation, should be
cited, and then you should enter your candid, but decided opposition to
the system, to its extension, to its evils where it exists. How soon we
should all be found working together, so far as we might, for the
amelioration of the colored race here, with a view to the extinction of
slavery in every form of it in which it is an evil, or a greater evil
than anything which might properly be substituted."

"Well," said Mrs. North, "husband, what do you say to that?"

"I like it," said he.

"But now," said I, "the language of the place of despair is exhausted in
describing and denouncing the South. If a man among us lifts up his
voice to say good things about Southerners, one universal hiss goes up
from all your conventions and anti-slavery prints. He may be seeking the
same end with you, namely, the peaceful removal of slaver