owner's home, and when the parents die, if she survives, taken by some branch of the family or neighbor from regard to her and to them; her moral and religious character improved under their training, a respectable standing in society conferred upon her by her connection with them, her religious privileges sacredly secured to her, any insult redressed as though it were the family's personal affair; she a partaker of their food and of all their comforts, and followed to her grave with respect and love; or, for the sake of priceless liberty,' 'heaven's best gift to man,' would you prefer to see her seated under the iron fence of a park, an old umbrella tied to the pickets for her shelter, and she, in rain and sunshine, selling 'Old Dan Tucker,' 'Jim Crow, Illustrated,' and pea-nuts, and sleeping you know not where? Which lot would you choose for a child? Which is best for this world and the next? In one case, she is 'owned,' she is a slave ;' and in the other, she is a free woman.

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"You have no right," said he, with some warmth, "to take the best condition in slavery, and the very worst in freedom, and compel me to choose."

"Best condition in slavery!"" said I; "" said I; "is there any 'best' in being a slave, in not being free? Does it admit of degrees? Is not being 'owned' such a curse, such an unmixed iniquity in its essence, that to compare its best estate with the worst in freedom, is like comparing the best devil with the most inferior saint? Is not a devil's nature incapable of comparison as good, better, best, with anything which is not, in its nature, devilish? According to your conversation just now, it seemed as though being 'owned' always implied an unmitigated transgression; and now when I inquire whether you would prefer degradation to the iniquity of being 'owned'

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in comfort and usefulness, respectability and happiness, you shrink from the question. If freedom in the abstract is the best thing under the sun, of course you will prefer it to everything else. No happy condition, not happy prospect for this life, and the life to come can, in your view, make being a slave,' as you call it, capable of being compared with this abstract privilege of being free. In this you and your friends labor under a huge mistake, and it poisons all your views and feelings about slavery. When you denounce slave-holders and slavery, and depict the condition of the slave in your awful colors, they at the South know that in hundreds of thousands of instances, as it regards masters and slaves, all that you say is practically false; you are carried away by your zeal against a theoretical wrong.

"Now suppose that instead of starting with the theoretical wrong and getting only such facts as illustrate it, you should travel through the South to pick up such letters as you consider this, respecting Kate, to be; -what a pleasing view might be presented of the slaves' condition in cases without number!"

"But," said he, "there are terrible evils underlying these fair features of slavery."

True," said I, "but why, in the name of truth and love do you never hear such a letter as this read on the platforms of Northern abolition societies? What mingled groans and hisses and shrieks for freedom, and then what an emptying of the demoniacal epithets there would be, if such a letter should be offered. One case of whipping would have more effect than a thousand such letters, in your assemblies and newspapers. No one from the continent of Europe would infer from those meetings that such beings as Kate and her little babe,

and this lady and her husband and father, existed even in fiction, but that slave-holders are Legrees, and the slaves their victims. What a beautiful effect it would have on us and on the South, if touching tales of loving-kindness between masters and slaves, instances of perfect happiness in that relation, should be cited, and then you should enter your candid, but decided opposition to the system, to its extension, to its evils where it exists. How soon we should all be found working together, so far as we might, for the amelioration of the colored race here, with a view to the extinction of slavery in every form of it in which it is an evil, or a greater evil than anything which might properly be substituted."

"Well," said Mrs. North, "husband, what do you say to that?"

"I like it," said he.

"But now," said I, "the language of the place of despair is exhausted in describing and denouncing the South. If a man among us lifts up his voice to say good things about Southerners, one universal hiss goes up from all your conventions and anti-slavery prints. He may be seeking the same end with you, namely, the peaceful removal of slavery, with due regard to the highest good of all concerned; but let him utter a word in arrest of your unqualified condemnation of slavery as it actually is, and there are no persecutors, nor scourges, nor intolerance on the earth, more fierce and cruel than you and your denunciations.”

"Take it patiently, husband," said Mrs. North, “you know that you deserve it."

"I know from this," said I, "if from nothing else, that your theory is wrong. The truth does not excite such passions in those who love and seek to promote it. We

see that, in cases without number, the present condition of the slaves is a blessing for both worlds, and that if all who possess slaves were, as many are, slavery would cease to be any more of a curse than any dependent condition in this world. There must always be those who will do every sort of menial work. The great Father of all, who himself says that he has deprived' the ostrich of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding,' so arranges the capacities of some that their happiness consists in leaning upon superior intelligence and capability.

"The serving people, in some districts of country, are volunteers from all races; at the South, they consist of one inferior, dependent race, who for ages have been slaves in their own country, and would be such even now, if they were there. We will not shut the door of hope forever upon any part of the human family, as to their elevation among the tribes of men, but this race has, for a long period of its history, evidently been undergoing a tutelage and discipline at the hand of Providence. There is some marvellous arrangement of Providence, it seems to me, designing that this black race shall lean upon us. Let the same number of any other immigrant race have gone from us to Canada as of this colored race, and the world would have heard a better report from them ere this. They thrive best in connection with us as their masters, whether it be right or wrong for us to be in such relation to them."

“But now,” said he, in a persuasive tone, and evidently wishing to turn the drift of the remarks,

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set them free, and hire them; we shall agree then. The slaves will be as well off, and so will their masters." "Mr. North," said I, "being owned is, in itself, irre

spective of the character of the master, a means of protection to the negro. Somebody then is responsible for him as his guardian and provider, and is amenable to the State for his sustenance. You can easily see that, let the colored people come to be a hireling class, and their interests and those of their masters are disjoined. There would be conflicts and oppressions among themselves; they would fall into a degraded, serf-like condition; but now each of them partakes of his master's interests, and rises with him, I am not here pleading for slavery in the abstract, but, the blacks being on the soil, it is far better for them to be owned than to be free. Why are the Southwestern States, one after another, passing laws, or framing their constitutions, to shut out from their borders free negroes,—people in the very condition into which you would reduce by wholesale all the blacks in the South? I pray you look and see that you are an abstractionist, setting what you deem a theoretical wrong against a practical good, and under the circumstances, a real mercy."

"But," said Mr. North, "slavery impoverishes the soil, makes the whites shun labor, feeling it to be degrading, and it keeps the white children from industrial pursuits, and

"Please stop," said I, "my dear Sir, and think of what you are saying, and be not carried away by that popular flood of cant phrases. Now you know that God has given our Southern friends a south country, nearer than ours to the tropics. Out-of-door labor there is injurious to the white people, as you know. They are not to be blamed for this. God has not given them strength to endure exposure to the sun. Had they a northern climate, in which the labor required by the mechanic arts could be performed with safety and comfort, do you not suppose