have no fear that it can ever happen. But,' said he,
addressing me, 'I presume that I know, Sir, how your people in the Free
States, to a very considerable extent, think on this point. I will
speak, by-and-by, of the other two ways in which slavery may find its
great result. One, I say, is, by insurrection and then the extermination
of the black race; for that would surely follow their temporary success
if I can trust my apprehensions of the subject.'

"'Please, sir,' said I, 'let me hear what you think is 'very
considerably' the sentiment at the North on this subject of
insurrection.'

"'I presume sir,' said he, 'if the slaves should, some night, take
possession of us, and demand a universal manumission, and we should
refuse, and fire and sword and pillage and all manner of violence should
ensue, and our persons and property should be at their will, vast
multitudes of your people, including clergymen, would exclaim that the
day of God's righteous vengeance had come, and they would say, Amen.'

"'So we interpret Thomas Jefferson's idea,' said I.

"'I think, Sir,' said he, 'that very many reasonable people of the North
are of opinion that all the attributes of God are against any such
procedure.

"'In the large sense in which nations speak to each other when they are
asserting their rights, there is no objection to the first clause in the
Declaration of Independence; but when you come to the people of a state,
and one portion of that people rise and assert their right to break up
the constitution of things under which they live, there is no more
pertinency in that clause in the Declaration than there would be in
giving us the reason for a revolution that all men are not far from five
or six feet high. What they say may be true in the abstract, but it
does not prove that men, having come into a state of society,
involuntarily, if you please, have all the freedom and equality which
they would have, if they were each an independent savage in the
wilderness. Society is God's ordinance, not a compact. We have, all of
us, lost some of our freedom and equality in the social state; now how
far is it right that the blacks, being here, no matter how or why,
should lose some of theirs? and how far is it right that we should take
and keep some of it from them, whether for the good of all concerned, or
for the good of ourselves, their civil superiors?--whose welfare, it may
be observed, will continually affect theirs.'

"The