Page:A letter on "Uncle Tom's cabin" (1852).djvu/26

22, give every facility for the education of slaves, and for their gradual manumission. Try to make different classes of slaves (what I mean is, not to keep them all to the same functions), for that will make freedom easier to be given, and better used when it does come. Perhaps all these efforts will not settle the question. A great crash will come some day to do that. Such is the way even with us, who are a much older nation than you are: we never work out any thing gradually and patiently. A Reform Bill, an Abolition of Corn Laws, or a Catholic Emancipation, always comes on a sudden, and is carried through with all the want of wisdom which there is in undue haste. If nobody, however, had thought and talked and written about these great changes, they would have come still more abruptly than they did.

But to return to the slave-owner. For my own part I cannot imagine a more splendid career, intellectually speaking, than that of a slave-owner in a slave state who is thoroughly awakened to the difficulty of his position. In a minor way Irish land-owners have had, of late years, a similar trial; and several of them have come nobly out of it. This slave-owner will certainly have difficulty enough before him,—with his own early prejudices to contend against,—jealous neighbors to