newspapers, of those who continued to patronize Northern educational institutions, I never conversed with a cultivated Southerner on the effects of slavery, that he did not express a wish or intention to have his own children educated where they should be free from demoralizing association with slaves. That this association is almost inevitably corrupting and dangerous, is very generally (I may say, excepting by the extremest fanatics of South Carolina, universally) admitted. Now, although the children of a few wealthy men may, for a limited period, be preserved from this danger, the children of the million cannot be. Indeed it requires a man of some culture, and knowledge of the rest of the world, to appreciate the danger sufficiently to guard at all diligently against it. If habitual intercourse with a hopelessly low and immoral class is at all bad in its effects on young minds, the people of the South are, as a people, educated subject to this bad influence, and must bear the consequences. In other words, if the slaves must not be elevated, it would seem to be a necessity that the citizens should steadily degenerate,
Change and grow more marked in their peculiarities with every generation, they certainly do, very obviously. "The South" has a traditional reputation for qualities and habits in
- [Footnote: *pressed the view I had been led to form of the evil of slavery in this way, replied
that he thought I over-estimated the evil to boys on the plantations, but that it was impossible to over-estimate it in towns. "I have personal knowledge," he continued, "that there are but two lads, sixteen years old, in our town, [a small market town of Alabama,] who have not already had occasion to resort to remedies for the penalty of licentiousness." "When on my brother's plantation, just before I came North," said another Southern merchant, on his annual visit to New York, "I was informed that each of his family-servants were suffering from , and I ascertained that each of my brother's children, girls and boys, had been informed of it, and knew how and from whom it had been acquired. The negroes being their familiar companions, I tried to get my brother to send them North with me to school. I told him he might as well have them educated in a brothel at once, as in the way they were growing up."]
