Note A — * * * * * THIRD EDITION. Price 6 1-4 cents single, 62 1-2 cents per dozen, $4 per hundred. No. 3. THE ANTI-SLAVERY EXAMINER. * * * * * LETTER OF GERRIT SMITH TO REV. JAMES SMYLIE, OF THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI.

We must continue to judge of slavery by what it is, and not by what you tell us it will, or may be. Until its character be righteous, we shall continue to condemn it; but when you shall have brought it back to your sinless and beautiful theory of it, it will have nothing to fear from the abolitionists. There are two prominent reasons, however, for believing that you will never present Southern slavery to us in this lovely character, the mere imagination of which is so dear to you. The first is, that you are doing nothing to this end. It is an indisputable fact that Southern slavery is continually getting wider and wider from God, and from an innocent theory of servitude; and the "good men at the South," of whom we have spoken, are not only doing nothing to arrest this increasing divergency, but they are actually favoring it. The writings of your Dews, and Baxters, and Plummers, and Postells, and Andersons, and the proceedings of your ecclesiastical bodies, abundantly show this. Never, and the assertion is borne out by your statute books, as well as other evidences, has Southern slavery multiplied its abominations so rapidly, as within the last ten years; and never before had the Southern Church been so much engaged to defend and perpetuate these abominations. The other of these reasons for believing that Southern slavery will never be conformed to your beau ideal of slavery, in which it is presupposed there are none but principles of righteousness, is, that on its first contact with these principles, it would "vanish into thin air," leaving "not a wreck behind." In proof of this, and I need not cite any other case, it would be immediate death to Southern slavery to concede to its subjects, God's institution of marriage; and hence it is, that its code forbids marriage. The rights of the husband in the wife, and of the wife in the husband, and of parents in their children, would stand directly in the way of that traffic in human flesh, which is the very life-blood of slavery; and the assumptions of the master would, at every turn and corner, be met and nullified by these rights; since all his commands to the children of those servants (for now they should no longer be called slaves) would be in submission to the paramount authority of the parentsA. And here, sir, you and I might bring our discussion to a close, by my putting the following questions to you, both of which your conscience would compel you to answer in the affirmative.