The country is free. It has no king. The people rule. I have read a
little and heard something of America. At Oxford we students had
wondered at the anomaly of a republic maintaining the institution of
slavery. I asked him about this. He said that it did not involve any
contradiction; that the United States was founded by white men for white
men; that negroes were a lower order of beings; that their servitude was
justified by the Bible; that a majority of the clergy and the churches
of the country approved of the institution; that the slaves were well
treated, much better housed and fed than the workers of Europe; better
than the free laborers even in America. His thesis was that the business
of life was the obtaining of the means of life; that all the uprisings
in Europe, the French Revolution included, were inspired by hunger; that
the struggle for existence was bound to produce oppression; that the
strong would use and control the weak, make them work, keep them in a
state where they could be worked. All this for trade. He topped off this
analysis with the remark that negro slavery was a benign institution,
exactly in line with the processes of the business of life; that it had
been lied about by a growing fanaticism in the States; New York had
always been in sympathy, for the most part with the Southern States,
where slavery was a necessary institution to the climate and the cotton
industry. He went on to tell me that about a year before a maniacal
cobbler named William Lloyd Garrison had started a little paper called
_The Liberator_ in which he advocated slave insurrections and the
overthrow of the laws sustaining slavery; and that a movement was now on
foot in New England to found the American Anti-Slavery Society. And that
John Quincy Adams, once President, but now a senile intermeddler, had
been presenting petitions in Congress from various constituencies for
the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. This would be
finally squelched, he thought. New England had always demanded a tariff
in order to foster her industries, and that policy trenched on the