at he may be a slave till the
time comes for him to be something else. So He has given the Jews their
peculiarities, fitting them for His purposes with regard to them; and to
the Irish laborer He has given his willingness and strength to dig,
making him the builder of your railways. If we fulfil our trust, with
regard to the blacks, according to the spirit and rules of the New
Testament, I believe God will be our defender, and that all his
attributes will be employed to maintain our authority over this people
for his own great purposes. We have nothing to fear except from white
fanatics, North and South.'

"'I have no idea,' said the Judge, 'of dooming every individual of this
colored race to unalterable servitude. I am in favor of putting them in
the way of developing any talent which any of them, from time to time,
may exhibit. More of this, I am sure, would be done by us, if we were
freed from the necessity of defending ourselves against Northern
assaults upon our social system, involving, as these assaults do, peril
to life, and to things dearer than life. But I see tenfold greater evils
in all the plans of emancipation which have ever been proposed than in
the present state of things.'

"The pastor of the place, who was present, had not taken much part in
the discussion, though he had not purposely kept aloof from it. He was
Southern born, inherited slaves, had given them their liberty one by
one, and had recently returned from the North, where he had been to see
two of them--the last of his household--embark as hired servants with
families who were to travel in Europe.

"Some of us asked him about his visit to the North. Said he, 'I went to
church one day, and was enjoying the devotional services, when all at
once the minister broke out in prayer for the abolition of slavery. He
presented the South before God as "oppressors," and prayed that they
might at once repent, and "break every yoke," and "let the oppressed go
free." I took him to be an immediate emancipationist, perhaps peculiar
in his views. But in the afternoon I went into another church, and in
prayer the minister began to pray "for all classes and conditions of men
among us." I was glad to see, as I thought, charity beginning at home.
But the next sentence took in our whole land; and the next was a
downright swoop upon slavery; so that I regarded his previous petitions
merely as spiral movements toward the South. If the good man's petitions
had been