tical duties?

"Every condition of poverty and toil has its peculiar hardships and
sorrows. But putting together, respectively, all the advantages and the
disadvantages of our slaves, he who looks upon a population with
enlarged views of liabilities and of the inevitable results in the
working of different schemes of labor, and is not so weak or morbid as
to dwell inordinately on real and imaginary wrongs and miseries, which,
after all, if real, are compensated for by advantages or surpassed by
aggregated smaller evils in other conditions, must admit that, the
colored people being here, their being owned is the very best possible
thing for their protection, and the surest guarantee against all their
liabilities to want in hard times, sickness, and old age.

"Speaking of hard times leads me to say, that if you could put four
millions of laboring people in the Free States, for a winter or during
commercial distresses and the stagnation of every kind of business, in a
position where, while they were still active and useful, a single
thought or care about their sustenance would not visit them, you would
be deemed a philanthropist and public benefactor. There will not be the
same number of people in the laboring class throughout our land next
winter, in any one section, whose comfort and happiness will exceed that
of our slaves."

"Oh, well," said Mr. North, "all this may be true, but this does not
reconcile me to slavery. Our horses here at the North will all be
comfortably provided for, notwithstanding any money pressure. But I
would rather be a human being and fail, every winter, than be a horse."

"Husband," said Mrs. North, "do you consider that a parallel case? Mr.
C. is not arguing, as I understand him, that slavery is better than
freedom. He is not persuading us to be slaves rather than free. He takes
these four millions of blacks as he finds them, in bondage, and he asks,
What shall we do with them? You say, Set them free. He says, They are
better off, as a race, in their present bondage, than they would be if
made free, to remain here. Not that they are better off than four
millions of colored people, who had never been slaves, would be in a
commonwealth by themselves."

"I thank you, Mrs. North," said I, "for your clear and correct statement
of my position. And now I will take up Mr. North's parable about the
horses, and apply it justly. Let hay and grass be exceedingly scarce,
and I had rather take my chance