But I had learned from the writings of A.Campbell to judge slave-holders with a charitable judgment.

They had inherited the institution of slavery from their fathers, and like the aristocratic institutions of the old world, it had come down to them without any fault of their own.

My experiences in Kansas certainly had not made me love slavery any better; still, all this, how bitter soever it might be to me, had revealed so much of real nobility in the hearts of many slave-holders that it had not impaired my feeling of good will to them.

If I were to grant that they had been associated sometimes with men of desperate morals, had I not also been associated with Jim Lane, and had I not been compelled to hide myself behind the old maxims, that "Politics, like poverty, makes us acquainted with strange bedfellows ?" And so I argued with Bro.

Cox the views I held, stoutly asserting them, when, for a wonder to him, Bro.