Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/299

 certain that freedom would be much worse. Then, again, there appears to be among us a vastly larger class than any body supposed, who hold that slavery is no evil at all in any sense, but a positive good — a good thing for the slaves, who are thus enabled to live free from care, in sleek and happy contentment, and a good thing for the masters, who, in being raised above the necessity of base and servile employments, are thus enabled to preserve the dignity of freedom. This romantic view of the case might not, perhaps, so well bear discussion, but you see they do not intend to allow any. Yet, without a full and free discussion of our existing system, in all its bearings and operations, how can we reasonably hope or expect to bring about any beneficial change? The struggle which you now see beginning, and which this northern appeal to southern consciences has provoked, is plainly, to my mind, the final and decisive struggle between the extension and perpetuation of slavery on the one hand and emancipation on the other. he institution of slavery in this country is vastly more potent than any body had supposed. It not only has complete control of the governments of all the southern states, so as to be enabled to enact whatever laws it pleases, but, by means of its vigilance committees and its system of lynchings, it completely overrides both laws and constitutions in the exercise of a despotic and arbitrary power, derived from the discretionary discipline of the plantation, but totally inconsistent with all established ideas of English or American liberty. Not content with this, it is eagerly clutching at all the powers and patronage of the general government, which it seeks to transform from a bulwark of freedom to a bulwark of slavery; and not content with this, it seeks to dictate to the northern states a course of action in conformity with this same view. Having completely suppressed, at least for the time being, all liberty, at the south, of speech, writing, or reading on this forbidden subject, it is endeavoring to accomplish the same thing at the north. Northern