been accomplished before, and hoped it might not long be delayed. In his opinion, emancipation should be gradual. He proposed that all slave children born after 1855 or 1860 should be free when reaching the age of twenty-five years, then to be hired out under the authority of the state for a period of not exceeding three years, in order to earn a sum sufficient to pay the expenses of their transportation to Liberia, and to provide them an outfit for six months after their arrival there. Their offspring were to be free from their birth, but to be apprenticed until the age of twenty-one, and also to go to Liberia.
This, surely, was a very slow process; and his favorite scheme of transportation to Liberia, based upon his firm belief that the two races could not possibly live together in a state of freedom, could hardly bear examination in point of practicability as well as of justice. The advanced anti-slavery men of the time criticised the plan with great severity. But the principal merit of the letter lay in the fact that Clay, as a slave-holder, and as the foremost citizen of a Slave State, proposed a plan of emancipation in any form, accompanying it with such radical reasoning on the general subject of slavery; and that merit was great. As to the practical effect of the plan, had it been adopted, Clay was certainly not wrong in suggesting that, the work once begun, a general disposition would exist to accelerate and complete it. But it was not adopted. On the contrary, the discussion served
