Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/283

 said, "than Washington, or Patrick Henry. This is an evil, cursed system, beyond the reach of individual effort, and only to be remedied by public action. The worst evils, 1 am satisfied, that could possibly arise from setting all the slaves free to-morrow, would not begin to approach the amount of evil suffered, whether by blacks or whites, in every ten years that slavery continues to exist." "What," I asked, "would it be safe to set so many ignorant slaves free at once, and without any preparation for it? The general opinion among slaveholders seems to be that, if so freed, the slaves would begin by cutting the throats and taking possession of the wives and daughters of their masters, and end by dying of starvation for want of somebody to provide for them. You must begin, they say, by preparing them for freedom." "It is hardly worth while," answered Mr Mason, "to speculate upon a contingency so improbable, just now, as the setting free of all the slaves by the spontaneous act of their owners. A deal of preparation, I fear, will be wanting before we can come to that — preparation not so much, however, on the part of the slaves as on that of the masters. The slaves, in my opinion, are quite well enough prepared for freedom already; about as much so as slaves ever will be or can be. From my observations at home and abroad, they are decidedly more intelligent, and a good deal more kind-hearted and. manageable, than either the Trish or the English peasantry. The difficulty, and the only difficulty, about their working for wages, is precisely the same which has defeated two or three attempts that I have known to carry on plantations by free laborers imported from Europe. While we have so much more land than inhabitants, as we still do in most of the southern states, the negroes would prefer to scatter, and, instead of working for wages, to set up, like our present poorer class of free whites, each man a little plantation of his own. That is what has happened in Hayti. The sugar plantations which require the employment of numerous laborers