And now, all this being so, it appears to me the only question for a pure and enlarged philanthropy is, what ought to be the policy of the Anglo-Saxon race, influenced by principles of sound wisdom, and true religion, towards this other race, thus thrown among them, constituting a strange and distinct people, from their introduction known by others and knowing themselves only as slaves, and whose retrocession to Africa is, at least at present, both undesirable and impossible? Such I conceive to be the momentous and solemn inquiry for the South; and on this point, it is plain that a diversity of opinions may exist among those who are inspired with the sincerest love for God and man. In these States it is the settled conviction of many who devote their lives to the spiritual good of the slave population, that the principles and precepts of the gospel, and the course pursued by Christ and the apostles, are exactly adapted to the consummation most to be wished; and that, slowly but certainly, Christianity, as an alterative, is elevating the negro in the scale of being, and educating his mind and heart for purposes as yet concealed from us by an inscrutable Providence. And whatever may be the design of God, they are confident he needs not the wrath and fury of man; and that "if a good work cannot be carried on by the calm, self-controlled, benevolent spirit of Jesus, then the time for doing it has not come. At the North I have been honored with the friendship of some of the holiest and wisest Christians, and have found them differing from each other as to the practical

and excommunicated, and regarded as unfit to be employed as a missionary.

question; confessing that they had no matured views at all; painfully conscious that a wisdom and a power high above man's are required for such a cause; and devoutly lifting their souls to God, in a prayer now breathed night and day by thousands at the South-that he will work both to will and to do, and bring to pass all his good pleasure, and cause his kingdom everywhere to come and his will everywhere to be done.

In the remarks just made I have supposed, of course, that slavery is not proved to be a great crime; for if it be, no such question as that above stated can be entertained. That sin must at once be abandoned, is a proposition which admits of no debate. If slavery, then, be a sin, it should at once be abolished. It is true the experiment with us would be very different from that in the British West Indies. There the masters were conciliated, the slaves were few compared with our millions, and they are awed into subordination by a powerful military force. Yet even there the wisdom and benevolence of the measure are extremely problematical, and becoming every day more so. The parliamentary reports confess that the freed negroes refuse to work for hire, and England is compelled to rescue her colonies from destruction by reviving the slave-trade under a new name, and importing cargoes of Africans into her islands, there to starve or accept any wages offered, or, as will probably be the result, to augment the evil by swelling the crowd of drones around them.*

* See an able article on this subject in a late Westminster Review.

But in these States it is believed by men of the most devoted piety, and exalted philanthropy, and after patient and prayerful survey of the whole ground, that immediate and unconditional abolition would be a revolution involving the entire South in ruin; breaking up all social order and peace and safety; and, in fact, inflicting on the slaves themselves irreparable mischief. It would suddenly give them a liberty for which they are wholly unprepared, and which would be only a license for indolence and crime. It would convert them, inevitably, from a contented and cheerful peasantry, into a horde of outlaws, a multitude of paupers with whom the white population could never amalgamate, who must forever feel themselves (witness their condition even at the North) degraded and outcast from the kindred and privi. leges of the superior caste; who, deprived of the master's protection, and no longer bound to their governors by the kindly and almost filial ties now existing, would endure perpetual humiliation and insult, and drag out a sullen life of envy and hatred and wretchedness; or, if instigated to revenge and insurrection, be certainly crushed, and either annihilated, or subjugated to an iron bondage, a military rule, from the rigors of which they would look back to their former state as one, not only of comparative, but real, substantial, contrasted liberty and happiness.

If, however, slavery be a crime, I repeat it, the consequences of abolition should not be considered at all. It is, then, of first rate importance that we inquire into the moral character of slavery. If it be a sin, all discussion as to the policy which should

be adopted towards the Ethiopian race among us is precluded and superseded.

Let me finish this letter by assuring you that, if my great distance from you did not prevent it, I would submit all I write to your judgment before allowing it to be published; since nothing could mortify and grieve me more than to utter a word which you or anybody can regard as not deferential and affectionate. If, then, a syllable escapes me in this correspondence which you think might have been softened or omitted, I beg you, once for all, to forgive it. Ascribe it to the haste with which I have to write. Ascribe it to the state of my nerves, which keep me constantly restless and in pain. Ascribe it, in short, to any thing but a want of that sincere esteem and love with which I am, my dear brother,

Yours,

R. FULLER.

LETTER II.

TO THE REV. FRANCIS WAYLAND, D. D.

MY DEAR BROTHER

The issue now before us regards the essential moral character of slavery; and on such a question I am strongly disposed to pass by all ethical and metaphysical dissertation, and appeal at once to the only standard of right and wrong which can prove decisive. For my own part, I am heartily

sick and weary of the controversies and debates waged and waging on every side, in which each party is contending, not for truth, but victory, and which have effected just nothing, for the want of some arbiter recognised by all, and whose decree shall be final and infallible. Now such an um

pire we have. Whatever importance others may attach to the deductions of human reasoning, and thus impiously array against the Scriptures those "oppositions of science falsely so called," which the Apostle terms "profane and vain babblings," you and I have long since put on our shields one motto "Let God be true and every man a liar.” There are, indeed, some truths which are seen, like the sun, by their own light; but when the character of any human action admits of discussion at all, it admits, almost always, of indefinite discussion. The question itself of innocence and guilt is necessarily complex; and it is vain, too, in this day of knowledge and mental discipline, to expect any such signal results as formerly belonged to the trial by battle. No matter how an advocate seems to establish his opinions, they will not prove invulnerable. "He that is first in his own cause, seemeth just; but his neighbor cometh and searcheth him ;" and the result of this searching invariably is, that, at least in the judgment of the neighbor's party, the first becomes last and the last first.

It is, then, the responses of the sacred oracles to which we must after all appeal. But as we may rest assured that no science, truly so called, will be found opposed to revelation; and as I abhor and abjure the blasphemy which would charge the