Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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The escape of slaves forms the most irritating subject of discussion between the North and the South.

If on this, as on all other evils connected with or growing out of slavery, a common man of plain common sense, were asked his opinion, he would probably say–“remove the cause and the effects will cease; remove the oppression which induces to emigration, and a fugitive slave will be an impossibility.” But this “would only excite a smile at the South.” How mistaken is common sense!

The South are taking measures, (when was it otherwise?) to preserve, extend, and perpetuate slavery. The problem must be solved, if solved at all, without the oppression being removed.

By the combined influence of ignorance and fear, the amount of emigration has been reduced to a minimum. We could wish the South would adopt a mode of reasoning sometimes presented to us,–something of this sort;–in all kinds of business, losses are inevitable. Men at the North lose by fall of stocks, by consignments, by fires, and in a great variety of ways. If a Yankee loses a ship worth twenty thousand dollars, he does not expend one hundred thousand in endeavoring to fish it up. He simply enters it in his account of profit and loss. And if a slave runs away, we might as well make the same entry quietly, as to wound the feelings and sensibilities of our northern friends; magnifying and increasing “the deep sectional difference of inborn feeling;” and filling whole cities with grief, shame, and an indignation irrepressible, except by marines and detachments of artillery.