His thesis was that the business of life was the obtaining of the means of life; that all the uprisings in Europe, the French Revolution included, were inspired by hunger; that the struggle for existence was bound to produce oppression; that the strong would use and control the weak, make them work, keep them in a state where they could be worked.

All this for trade.

He topped off this analysis with the remark that negro slavery was a benign institution, exactly in line with the processes of the business of life; that it had been lied about by a growing fanaticism in the States; New York had always been in sympathy, for the most part with the Southern States, where slavery was a necessary institution to the climate and the cotton industry.

He went on to tell me that about a year before a maniacal cobbler named William Lloyd Garrison had started a little paper called _The Liberator_ in which he advocated slave insurrections and the overthrow of the laws sustaining slavery; and that a movement was now on foot in New England to found the American Anti-Slavery Society.

And that John Quincy Adams, once President, but now a senile intermeddler, had been presenting petitions in Congress from various constituencies for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.