Note W — SECTION IX.

Why is it that the free people of color are now, in almost every part of our country, threatened with banishment from State to State, and with hunting from city to city, until there shall be no place for the soles of their feet in this their native land? Is it because they are in reality, as slaveholders tell us, an inferior race of beings? No, my friends: their consistent conduct, their polished manners, and their great respectability, wherever they have enjoyed the advantages of equality of education and equality of motives, proclaim the contrary. The true cause of this almost universal prescription is to be found in the melancholy fact that we have been guilty of the most atrocious injustice to their forefathers and to themselves. We would therefore now banish the evidence of our guilt from before our eyes: for whom a man has injured, he is almost sure to hate. Some of the finest men I met with, during a residence of three years in London and Paris, were the offspring of African mothers. There no distinction is made in any grade of society, on account of color. I have repeatedly seen black gentlemen sitting on the sofas, conversing with the ladies, at the hospitable mansion of that universal philanthropist, Lafayette; and there were no persons present who appeared more respectable, or who were more respected.—[Address of Arnold Buffum, President of the New-England Anti-Slavery Society, delivered in Boston, Feb. 16, 1832.]