at the bottom of the column. This criticism supposes
the letters published under the name to be genuine, and to have
received amendment from no other hand; points which would not be
of easy investigation.[78]

The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first
instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by
every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect
merely of their condition in life.[79]

The opinion that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and
imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence. To justify a
general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the
subject may be submitted to the anatomical knife, to optical
glasses, to analysis by fire or by solvents. How much more then
where it is a faculty, not a substance, we are examining; where
it eludes the research of all the senses; where the conditions of
its existence are various and variously combined; where the
effects of those which are present or absent bid defiance to
calculation; let me all too, as a circumstance of great
tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of
men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may
perhaps have given them. To our reproach it must be said, that
though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the
races of black and or red men, they have never yet been viewed by
us as subjects of natural history. I advance it, therefore, as a
suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct
race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to
the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not
against experience to suppose that different species of the same
genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different
qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history, then, one
who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye
of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department
of man as distinct as nature has formed them?[80]

He was impressed, however, with the integrity of the Negroes and paid
them the following tribute:

Notwithstanding these considerations which must weaken their
respect for the laws of property, we find among them numerous
instances of the most rigid integrity, and as man