feel no hesitancy in replying to this interrogatory. It would be their
duty, as Christians, to liberate their slaves, provided the condition
of the slave would be improved thereby; otherwise it is their duty to
retain them in bondage, and make that provision for them which their
circumstances require. They should make ample provision for their
physical wants--enlighten their minds; and so far as is practicable
under existing circumstances, they should elevate their characters
above that debasement and degradation, in which, ignorance, prejudice
and vice has involved them. It is clearly the duty of slaveholders to
place their slaves in that condition, which will conduce most to their
happiness here and hereafter. But if this is their object, they could
not, as a general rule, take a worse step, than to liberate them in
their present condition and turn them loose among us. Nor do I
consider the mass of the negro population in this country as yet
prepared for colonization: but I would rejoice to see all
well-disposed and intelligent negroes manumitted and colonized.

The poverty, vice and degradation of free negroes is notorious,
throughout the length and breadth of this country--North and South;
but having so frequently alluded to it, I deem it unnecessary to say
more on the subject. I will however remark, that if the entire African
population were manumitted and turned loose among us; they would be
forced to subsist almost entirely by theft, and all the county jails
and state prisons in the Union, would not contain one in a hundred of
the convicts. The fact is, such would be their depredations on the
white population, that the whites would shoot them down with as little
ceremony as they now shoot a mad dog; and their ultimate extermination
would be the inevitable consequence! I appeal to facts. It was stated
a few years ago by an able writer; that in Massachusetts the free
negroes were 1 to 74, viz., there were 74 white persons for every free