Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/290

 had led to the emancipation of several favorite slaves, with the view of sending them to Liberia; and his glowing imagination, overleaping, in the eagerness of benevolent hope, all bounds of time and space, seemed to regard as an event almost at hand the removal of the black and colored population from the United States, and the civilization and Christianization of Africa. So thoroughly did he seem himself convinced, and so did he warm and light up with the subject, that, however visionary his hopes might appear, nothing could be more agreeable than to hear him give utterance to them..

These brilliant hopes, however, we found for the moment obscured by an ominous shadow. Mr Telfair spoke without bitterness, yet not without indications of the most poignant regret, of the late doings of the northern abolitionists, as having put back the cause of emancipation, he feared, for many, many years. He himself had just been made personally to feel their effects. He had established, in connection with his church, a Sunday school for the slaves, in which, besides oral instruction, some of them had been taught to read. A committee of planters had just waited upon him to require him to discontinue this course of instruction — in fact, during the present state of excitement, and, until further notice, to discontinue his slave Sunday school altogether. "Ah, captain Moore," said Mr Telfair, addressing himself to me, this is but an unfavorable time for you to visit the southern states. You see what it is to have slavery in a country. In fact, it makes slaves of the whole of us. It now appears that the liberty of the press, and the freedom of speech, about which we have made so many boasts, cannot be allowed, consistently with the public safety, in countries where slavery prevails. There is at this moment no more liberty of speech or of writing in any slave state — and from the accounts we get of mobs and riots in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, the case does not seem to be much Better in the free