mission of crimes by the same laws which restrain other
citizens: if he steals, he will be imprisoned: if he commits murder,
he will be hung.

It will, perhaps, be said that the free people of color in the slave
portions of _this_ country are peculiarly ignorant, idle, and vicious?
It may be so: for our laws and our influence are peculiarly calculated
to make them bad members of society. But we trust the civil power
to keep in order the great mass of ignorant and vicious foreigners
continually pouring into the country; and if the laws are strong enough
for this, may they not be trusted to restrain the free blacks?

In those countries where the slaves codes are mild, where emancipation
is rendered easy, and inducements are offered to industry, insurrections
are not feared, and free people of color form a valuable portion of the
community. If we persist in acting in opposition to the established laws
of nature and reason, how can we expect favorable results? But it is
pronounced _unsafe_ to change our policy. Every progressive improvement
in the world has been resisted by despotism, on the ground that changes
were dangerous. The Emperor of Austria thinks there is need of keeping
his subjects ignorant, that good order may be preserved. But what
he calls good order, is sacrificing the happiness of many to the
advancement of a few; and no doubt knowledge _is_ unfavorable to the
continuation of such a state of things. It is precisely so with the
slaveholder; he insists that the welfare of millions must be subordinate
to his private interest, or else all good order is destroyed.

It is much to be regretted that Washington enfranchised his slaves in
the manner he did; because their poverty and indolence have furnished
an ever ready argument for those who are opposed to emancipation.[Z]
To turn slaves adrift in their old age, unaccustomed to take care of
themselves, without employment, and in a community where all the
prejudices were strongly arrayed against free negroes, was certainly an
unhappy experiment.

[Footnote Z: With all my unbounded reverence for Washington, I have, I
confess, sometimes found it hard to forgive him for not manumitting his
slaves long before his death. A fact which has lately come to my
knowledge, gave me great joy; for it furnishes a reason for what had
appeared to me unpardonable. It appears that Washington possessed a gang
of negroes in right of his wife, with which his own negroes had
intermarr