Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/307

 Myself.—“I am certain that you, as well as I, wish freedom and happiness to the human race.” Southerner.—“Y—y—ye—e—e—e—s! but—but—”

And now come many buts, which are to prove the difficulty and the impossibility of the liberation of the negro race. That there is difficulty I am willing to concede, but not impossibility. This, however, is clear, that there requires a preparation for freedom, and that this has been long neglected. There is here, in Charleston, a noble man who thinks as I do on the matter, and who labours in this the only true direction and preparation for this freedom, namely, the negroes initiation into Christianity. Formerly their instruction was shamefully neglected, or rather opposed: the laws of the State forbidding that slaves should be taught to read and write, and long opposing their instruction, even in Christianity. But better times have come, and seem to be coming. People frequently, in their own houses, teach their slaves to read; and missionaries, generally methodists, go about the plantations preaching the Gospel.

But the onesidedness and the obstinate blindness of the educated class in this city, really astonish and vex me. And women, women, in whose moral sense of right, and in whose inborn feeling for the true and the good, I have so much faith and hope—women grieve me by being so shortsighted on this subject, and by being still more irritable and violent than the men. And yet it is women, who ought to be most deeply wounded by the immorality and the impurity of the institution! Does it not make a family a non-entity? Does it not separate husband and wife, mother and child? It strikes me daily with a sort of amazement when I see the little negro children, and think—“These children do not belong to their parents; their mother, who brought them into the world with suffering, who nourished them at her breast, who watched over them, she whose flesh and blood they