Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/298

 the leaders in this business are most afraid of, is not an insurrection of slaves, but an insurrection of. conscience — an insurrection which they intend to find the means, if they can, to anticipate and prevent.

"Here, now," he added, taking up a newspaper, "here it is openly confessed and stated in so many words by the Washington Telegraph, a leading champion of the rights and interests of the slaveholder, and a chief promoter of all the prevailing alarm: 'We hold' — here he read from the paper — 'that we have most to fear from the gradual operation of public opinion among ourselves, and that those are the most insidious and dangerous invaders of our rights and interests, who, coming to us in the guise of friendship, endeavor to persuade us that slavery is a sin, a curse, and an evil. Our greatest cause of apprehension is from the operation of the morbid sensibility which appeals to the consciences of our people, and would make them the voluntary instruments of their own destruction.' And the way in which it is proposed to prevent these appeals to the morbid sensibility of conscience is pretty distinctly set forth in another paragraph, which I find quoted from the Columbia: Telescope, a South Carolina paper: 'Let us declare that the question of slavery is not, and shall not be, open to discussion; that the system is deep rooted among us, and must remain forever; that the very moment any private individual attempts to lecture us upon its evils and immorality, and the necessity of putting means in operation to secure us from them, in the same moment his tongue shall be cut out and cast upon the dunghill.'

"This appeal to southern consciences, which it is proposed to put down by this summary process, has revealed the true state of the case. The great mass of our people, whether at the south or the north, even those who speak of slavery as an evil, do not really regard it so. Compared with the emancipation of the laves, they regard it as a positive good. They may possibly admit that slavery is bad, but they are quite