Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 9).djvu/67

 friction,—hence its facilities. The crooked stick ECA is the handle, FDB is another crooked stick, into which the blade is fixed at B. The wooden bar CD serves for fulcra, over which the blade is stretched by twisting the small rope EF, by means of the peg GH.

The sawing of fire-wood, and many other sorts of hard labour, are chiefly performed by black people. Happily, very few of these are now slaves in Pennsylvania. Free blacks, it is understood, have no difficulty in earning the means of subsistence, but the circumstance of their being despised and degraded, has had bad effects on their character. Even the Quakers, who have so honourably promoted negro emancipation, allot a separate part of the church to people of colour. In the state prison, too, they are separated from whites. These odious distinctions should be abolished in a free country.

Negroes are stigmatized as an inferior race; indolent, dishonest, and vindictive in the extreme. {38} There can be no doubt that, in many instances, these characteristics are too just, but it cannot be otherwise, while moral culture is, in a great measure, withheld from them, while they are excluded from the society of the wise and the good, and while the hope of applause gives no stimulus to the coloured man. Moral or immoral, he is a negro. This,