or requests of any sort, as the people had
hitherto had no such advocate, and had done very well without, and I was
only kept in an incessant state of excitement with all the falsehoods
they 'found they could make me believe.' How well they have done without
my advocacy, the conditions which I see with my own eyes even more than
their pitiful petitions demonstrate; it is indeed true, that the
sufferings of those who come to me for redress, and still more the
injustice done to the great majority who cannot, have filled my heart
with bitterness and indignation that have overflowed my lips, till, I
suppose, ---- is weary of hearing what he has never heard before, the
voice of passionate expostulation, and importunate pleading against
wrongs that he will not even acknowledge, and for creatures whose common
humanity with his own I half think he does not believe;--but I must
return to the North, for my condition would be almost worse than
theirs--condemned to hear and see so much wretchedness, not only without
the means of alleviating it, but without permission even to represent it
for alleviation--this is no place for me, since I was not born among
slaves, and cannot bear to live among them.

Perhaps after all what he says is true: when I am gone they will fall back
into the desperate uncomplaining habit of suffering, from which my coming
among them, willing to hear and ready to help, has tempted them; he says
that bringing their complaints to me, and the sight of my credulous
commiseration, only tend to make them discontented and idle, and brings
renewed chastisement upon them; and that so, instead of really befriending
them, I am only preparing more suffering for them whenever I leave the
place, and they can no more cry to me for help. And so I see nothing for
it but to go and leave them to their fate; perhaps, too, he is afraid of
the mere contagion of freedom which breathes from the very existence of
those who are free; my way of speaking to the people, of treating them, of
living with them, the appeals I make to their sense of truth, of duty, of
self-respect, the infinite compassion and the human consideration I feel
for them,--all this of course makes my intercourse with them dangerously
suggestive of relations far different from anything they have ever known,
and as Mr. O---- once almost hinted to me, my existence among slaves was
an element of danger to the 'institution.' If I should go away, the human
sympathy that