e fellows to the state-prison for
life, as you would do at the North, I sold them to go to Red River, and
was as willing to see them marched off, handcuffed, as you ever were to
see villains in the custody of the officers. But had any of your good
people from the North met them, an article would have appeared, perhaps,
in all your papers, telling of the heart-rending spectacle,--three human
beings, in a slave-coffle! going, they knew not where, into hopeless
bondage! And had they escaped and fled to Boston, the tide of
philanthropy there, in many benevolent bosoms, would have received new
strength in the grateful accession of these worshipful fugitives from
Southern cruelty. Whereas, all which love and kindness, and every form
of indulgence, instruction, and discipline, tempered with mercy, could
do, had been used with them in vain. One was a thief, the pest of the
county, and had earned long years in a penitentiary; but slavery, you
see, kept him at liberty! Another was brutally cruel to animals; another
was the impersonation of laziness. Two of them would have helped John
Brown, no doubt, had he come here, and they might have gained a Bunker
Hill name, at the North, in an insurrection here, as champions of
liberty.'

"This led to some remarks about the great economy which there is in the
Southern mode of administering discipline and correction on the spot,
and at once, instead of filling jails and houses of correction with
felons. But to dwell on this would lead me too far into a new branch of
our subject.

"This planter asked the young lady, the school-teacher, if tare and tret
were in her arithmetic? Upon her saying 'yes, in the older books,' he
told her that there was, seemingly, a good deal of tare and tret in
God's providence, when accomplishing his great purposes; and that to fix
the mind inordinately on evils and miseries incident to a great system
and forgetting the main design, was like a man of business being so
absorbed by the deductions and waste in a great staple as to forego the
trade. He said that he thought the Northern mind ciphered too much in
that part of moral arithmetic as to slavery.

"A very excellent gentleman from the District of Columbia who had held
an important office under government, gave us some valuable information.
He said that the extinction of slavery in New England was not because
the institution was deemed to be immoral or sinful, but from other
considerations and circumstances.