And It Is A Problem Which I Give The Master To Solve, Whether The Religious Precepts Against The Violation Of

Property, were not formed for _him_, as well as his slave, and whether the slave may not as justifiably take

A little from one who has taken _all_ from him, as he would slay one that would slay him?

"That a change in the relation in which a man is placed should change his ideas of moral right and wrong, is neither new, nor confined to the blacks; Homer tells us, it was so 2600 years ago: - 'Jove fixed it certain, that whatever day makes a man a slave, takes half his worth away.' But the slaves Homer speaks of were whites.

"But to return to the blacks. Notwithstanding this consideration, which must weaken their respect for the laws of property, we find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity; and as many as among their better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity.

"The opinion that they are inferiour in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence. To justify a general conclusion requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the anatomical knife, to optical glasses, to analysis by fire or solvents: how much more, then, when it is a faculty, not a substance, we are examining; where it eludes the research of all the senses; where the conditions of it's existence are various, and variously combined; where the effects of those which are present or absent bid defiance to calculation; let me add too, in a circumstance where our conclusions would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings, which their Creator may perhaps have given them! To our reproach it must be said, though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks[Footnote: Where Jefferson makes use of the word _Black_, in this extract, it is rigidly confined to the _Negroes_ originally from the coast of Africa, or their descendants.], whether originally a distinct race, or made so by time and circumstances, are inferiour to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."

* * * * *

_Boston, December 29th, 1796._

DEAR FRIEND,

Upon my arrival here, I had once more the mortification to find myself in the neighbourhood of the yellow fever, which had lately been imported. The uncommon, early, and severe north-west winds entirely prevented it from spreading; a fortunate circumstance for the inhabitants of Boston, as, from the narrowness of their streets, great population, and other circumstances, it must have been very fatal, had it not been by this means destroyed.

In order to give you the most regular account of this disorder I could procure, I must repeat several circumstances from former letters.

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