Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/293

 and the negroes, on any thing approaching to terms of equality. It seems to be believed that, so long as the blacks remain among us, we must either make slaves of them, or they will turn about and make slaves of us. The late president Jefferson gave expression to this common opinion, by his remark that we hold the slaves like a wolf by the ear, whom it is neither safe to hold nor to let go. I must confess that I, for one, — and a considerable number of our colonization friends would probably concur with me, — do not exactly assent to this view of the case. It seems to me that we whites are the wolf, and the unfortunate negroes the lamb whom we have caught by the ear, and whom, if we only had the will, we might let go without any sort of danger. Why can’t we allow freedom to the negroes as well as to the Trish or the Germans? But with the inveterate prejudices of our people, it seems useless to preach that doctrine. The poorest, meanest, and most degraded of our whites would be all up in arms at the very idea of it. The more low, brutal, and degraded a white man is, the more strenuously does he insist on the natural superiority of the white men, and the more he is shocked at the idea of allowing freedom to the ‘niggers.’ Our colonization system of emancipation yields to this invincible feeling. Before emancipating the slaves, or simultaneously with their emancipation, we propose to remove them out of the country. Regarded by the larger number as completely visionary, and even by us who believe in it, expected to operate, at least at first, only by very slow degrees, this scheme has not been calculated to produce much alarm. Even very vivid pictures of the evils of slavery, and strong declamations against it, have been permitted, so long as they have been regarded only as the expression of speculative opinions and of individual sentiment, accompanied, as they generally are, by the admission, more or less distinct, that, however great these evils may be, there is no hope or means of their removal so long as the two races remain in juxtaposition.