LETTER FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.

BOSTON, APRIL 22, 1845.

My Dear Friend:

You remember the old fable of "The Man and the Lion," where the lion
complained that he should not be so misrepresented "when the lions wrote
history."

I am glad the time has come when the "lions write history." We have been
left long enough to gather the character of slavery from the involuntary
evidence of the masters. One might, indeed, rest sufficiently satisfied
with what, it is evident, must be, in general, the results of such a
relation, without seeking farther to find whether they have followed in
every instance. Indeed, those who stare at the half-peck of corn a week,
and love to count the lashes on the slave's back, are seldom the "stuff"
out of which reformers and abolitionists are to be made. I remember
that, in 1838, many were waiting for the results of the West India
experiment, before they could come into our ranks. Those "results" have
come long ago; but, alas! few of that number have come with them, as
converts. A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests
than whether it has increased the produce of sugar,--and to hate slavery
for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women,--before
he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.