But to dwell on this would lead me too far into a new branch of our subject.
"This planter asked the young lady, the school-teacher, if tare and tret were in her arithmetic?
Upon her saying 'yes, in the older books,' he told her that there was, seemingly, a good deal of tare and tret in God's providence, when accomplishing his great purposes; and that to fix the mind inordinately on evils and miseries incident to a great system and forgetting the main design, was like a man of business being so absorbed by the deductions and waste in a great staple as to forego the trade.

He said that he thought the Northern mind ciphered too much in that part of moral arithmetic as to slavery.
"A very excellent gentleman from the District of Columbia who had held an important office under government, gave us some valuable information.
He said that the extinction of slavery in New England was not because the institution was deemed to be immoral or sinful, but from other considerations and circumstances.

It was abolished in Massachusetts, without doubt, by a clause, in the bill of rights, copied from the Declaration of Independence.

In Berkshire, one township, he believed, sued another for the support and maintenance of a pauper slave, and the Supreme Court decided that the bill of rights abolished slavery.

The question was as incidental, he said, as was the question in the Dred Scott case which the United States Supreme Court decided.