ing fever within a month or two after his arrival. I always thought the Colonization Society a good thing, as a sort of a brooding hen, under whose wings the callow humane sentiment of the south might take shelter, and be cherished and kept alive against a time of more efficient action. I never expected any thing important from what it might do directly, but a good deal from its keeping the evils of slavery, and the necessity of some remedy for them, constantly before the public mind. The best thing it has done yet certainly is, its having hatched out of its northern eggs these same abolition societies, which are making so much stir just at this moment."
"Indeed," I asked, "and is that the fact?"
"So far as I am informed," said Mr. Mason, "all the most active persons in these abolition societies first had their attention drawn to the subject by the colonization scheme. Of that scheme several of them were originally warm champions. But on further consideration, it seemed too much like carrying coals to Newcastle, the transporting some two or three millions of people from their homes, where their labor is greatly needed, and is capable of being productively applied, across the ocean to an uncultivated wilderness, where the native supply of labor already far exceeds the demand. As the slaves must be emancipated before they can be colonized, it seemed quite effort enough to emancipate them here, without being obliged to provide in addition for their transportation out of the country, at immense and ruinous expense, depriving the southern states of that productive labor which is the very thing they stand most in need of. It was these ideas combined with those of the sin and wrong of slavery, a wrong and sin to be abandoned, not gradually, but at once, that no doubt gave rise to the abolition societies."
"But," I asked, "in view of such results as those mentioned by Mr Telfair, how can you speak of the springing up of these societies as a good thing?"
"I hope," said Mr Mason, looking round with an air
