The people of the Free States ought to thank God that the South is willing to keep the colored people.

Instead of inflaming our passions against the abstract wrongfulness of holding fellow-men in bondage, we should consider that theoretical justice to the slaves as a whole would be practical inhumanity.

The destiny of the colored race here is a dark problem.

But it is not for us to penetrate the future.

When God is ready to finish his purposes with regard to their continuance with us, He will open a way for their liberation; in the mean time it is our duty to protect them from their own improvidence and from the neglect and degradation which they would suffer at the hands of the Free States.