Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/291

 states — than there is at Rome, Vienna, or Warsaw. I suppose that, in either of those cities, a man is at full liberty to express his opinion, in words or print, of domestic slavery as it exists in America. The only questions forbidden to be discussed there, are those relating to the domestic policy of those cities and countries. So here you may denounce Popery and Russian despotism as loudly as you please; but pray be very careful what you say about domestic slavery. In any mixed company, I should not think it safe, just now, to say what I have said here. In fact, I find myself already a marked man. A printed letter of mine to a friend, on behalf of the colonization scheme, in which, in proof of the evils of slavery, I had quoted from Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and other distinguished patriots, when just ready for publication, was seized-the other day, at Richmond, by the committee there, and ordered to be burnt as an incendiary publication."

"Indeed," said I, "then that unfortunate letter of yours was probably part of the bonfire that lighted my entrance into Richmond;" and I went on to give him an account of my adventures in that city. "Not content with burning my letter," so the good clergyman continued, "if, in fact, it was not rather Washington and Jefferson for whom the burning was meant, the Richmond committee have reported me to our county committee as a suspected person, on whom an eye is to be kept; and these good gentlemen, besides putting a stop to my Sunday school, have also taken my newspaper reading under their supervision. For some months past I had received through the post office a newspaper printed at New York, called the "Emancipator." It is, I understand, the chief organ of the new society of abolitionists there. It had been-sent to me gratuitously, and I had read it with a good deal of interest, wishing to discover what its conductors would be at. But this my good friends, or rather masters, of the committee of vigilance, consider altogether too dangerous. They