all, it is true as regards the able-bodied hired
man only. But take into the account children and women, those, for
example, that work naked in coal-mines, or wives whose sufferings
from the brutal treatment of husbands daily fill the reports of
police courts; take these into the reckoning, and the difference in
the consequences of abused power will be very small. The negro-slave
is as thoroughly protected as any laborer in Europe. He is protected
from every other man's wrong-doing by the ready interference of his
master; he is guarded from the master's abuse by the laws of the
land, and a vigilant, earnest public opinion. Let all cruelty be
punished; let all abuse of power be restrained; but to abolish the
relation of master and slave, because there are bad masters and
ill-treated slaves, would not be a whit wiser than to abolish
marriage, because there are brutal husbands and murdered wives.

"Yet, surely, it will be said, it must be admitted, after all, that
slavery is an evil. Yes, certainly, it is an evil; but in the same
sense only in which servitude or hired labor is an evil. To gain
one's bread by the sweat of one's brow, is a curse. But it is a
curse attended with a blessing. It is an evil that shuts out a
greater evil. Labor for wages, labor for subsistence, and
subjection to the authority of employer or master, are the
conditions on which alone the laboring masses, white or black, can
live with advantage to themselves and to society."--_De Bow's
Review_, _Jan_. 1860, pp. 56, 57.

Mr. North asked if I did not think that the colored people should be
assisted in their efforts to get an education.

"There are collegiate institutions," I told him, "for colored people, in
Oxford, Pa., and in Xenia, O. With great sorrow have I observed, that
applications to aid these institutions and to endow others for similar
purposes have been received with coldness and distrust by many who could
have made liberal contributions, for no other reason than the suspicion
that they were designed by Abolitionists to thrust forward the colored
man in an offensive manner. I have known the name of a leading
Abolitionist to be the death of a subscription-paper for such an
institution. This was a bitter prejudice. When philanthropy with regard
to the colored race among us falls into its natural channel, we shall
see the South and the North opening