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Mr. Editor:—From the hour of the first
enslavement of the African captives, and
their forcible introduction into the "New
World," to the present time, the idea of
their inferiority has been insidiously urged
by those who felt it to be to their interest
to keep them in a servile condition; and, as
if to hide their guilt, they attempt to justify
themselves, by resorting to the meanest and
contemptible subterfuge of denying their
bondmen's claims to equal brotherhood in
the human family, and exultingly point to the
lowly condition and mental inferiority of
their slaves, and the nominally free in the
Northern States, as evidence of their asser-
tion. Though often baffled in their fiendish
efforts, by the force of Truth and Reason,
still they battle with indomitable persever-
ance. They have long since discovered that
interest is the director of American sensi-
bilities, giving them force and directness to
the end desired. They let no opportunity
pass when it can be reached; and through
its selfish agency, they have, in a measure,
ingrafted this murderous idea upon the re-
ligion and politics of the nation, until its ac-
knowledgment has become the test of patri-
otism; and we have, thereby, presented to
the world the extraordinary phenomenon in
civilization, of some of the best educated
minds in the land supporting, directly or in-
directly, a monstrous evil and glaring error.
Thus have the masses become indoctrinated
with a false idea of true justice, the influ-
ence of which is robbing the body politic of
its vitality, like the parasite-fungus, that en-
twines its exhausting and poisonous tendrils
around its forest prey, until its sunken trunk
falls crumbling to the earth.

Counteraction has become necessary to
free the minds of the people from the ef-
fects and influence of their spiritual, poli-
tical and scholastic education, and to endea-
vor to turn their minds in that direction, from
which they can view and place the true es-
timate upon man as man, and not as a bond-
man. Believing, as I do, that in the minds
of the people, we are linked together as one
class and race, I am forced to the conclusion,
that, in consequence of the advancement of
our forefathers, slavery is the cause of Am-
erican prejudice, and that it "is the pivot"
upon which the feeling it has engendered
turns, and that the force of it is felt, more
or less, in proportion to the distance that we
are removed from the centre of its influence.

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