- tion. The slaves are one-fifteenth, but are mostly owned out
of the district, and hired annually to those who require their services. In the assessment of taxable property, for 1853, the slaves, owned or hired in the district, were valued at three hundred thousand dollars.
The coloured population voluntarily sustain several churches, schools, and mutual assistance and improvement societies, and there are evidently persons among them of no inconsiderable cultivation of mind. Among the police reports of the City newspapers, there was lately (April, 1855), an account of the apprehension of twenty-four "genteel coloured men" (so they were described), who had been found by a watchman assembling privately in the evening, and been lodged in the watch-house. The object of their meeting appears to have been purely benevolent, and, when they were examined before a magistrate in the morning, no evidence was offered, nor does there seem to have been any suspicion that they had any criminal purpose. On searching their persons, there were found a Bible; a volume of Seneca's Morals; Life in Earnest; the printed constitution of a society, the object of which was said to be "to relieve the sick and bury the dead;" and a subscription paper to purchase the freedom of Eliza Howard, a young woman, whom her owner was willing to sell at $650.
I can think of nothing that would speak higher for the character of a body of poor men, servants and labourers, than to find, by chance, in their pockets, just such things as these. And I cannot value that man as a countryman, who does not feel intense humiliation and indignation, when he learns that such men may not be allowed to meet privately together, with such laudable motives, in the capital city of the United States, without being subject to disgraceful punishment. One of the
