e is due to the masters. It is difficult to conceive a more
awful position than theirs: fettered by laws which impede every movement
towards right and justice, and utterly without the desire to repeal
them--dogged by the apprehension of nameless retributions--bound beneath a
burthen of responsibility for which, whether they acknowledge it or not,
they are held accountable by God and men--goaded by the keen consciousness
of the growing reprobation of all civilised Christian communities, their
existence presents the miserable moral counterpart of the physical
condition of their slaves; and it is one compared with which that of the
wretchedest slave is, in my judgement, worthy of envy.

* * * * *

_Letter to C.G., Esq._

Before entering upon my answer to your questions, let me state that I have
no claim to be ranked as an abolitionist in the American acceptation of
the word, for I have hitherto held the emancipation of the slaves to be
exclusively the business and duty of their owners, whose highest moral
interest I thought it was to rid themselves of such a responsibility, in
spite of the manifold worldly interests almost inextricably bound up with
it.

This has been my feeling hitherto with regard to the views of the
abolitionists, which I now, however, heartily embrace, inasmuch as I think
that from the moment the United States Government assumed an attitude of
coercion and supremacy towards the Southern States, it was bound with its
fleets and armies to introduce its polity with respect to slavery, and
wherever it planted the standard of the Union to proclaim the universal
freedom which is the recognised law of the Northern United States. That
they have not done so has been partly owing to a superstitious, but
honourable veneration for the letter of their great charter, the
constitution, and still more to the hope they have never ceased to
entertain of bringing back the South to its allegiance under the former
conditions of the Union, an event which will be rendered impossible by any
attempt to interfere with the existence of slavery.

The North, with the exception of an inconsiderable minority of its
inhabitants, has never been at all desirous of the emancipation of the
slaves. The Democratic party which has ruled the United States for many
years past has always been friendly to the slaveholders, who have, with
few exceptions, been all members of it (for by a strange perversion bot