COLOURED POPULATION. 119

exhausted and impoverished. Luxury has
been indulged by thousands who could illy
afford it; and poverty has rapidly followed its
footsteps.

Besides this, the state of Maryland has been
the last half century undergoing all the dif-
ficulties, distress and vexation which are at-
tendant upon that condition of society where
emancipation is progressing. Many of those
unfortunate beings when emancipated, are illy
qualified for their change of condition—they
form an incorrect estimate of the duties of
self government. It retires more than one
age to redeem a generation of slaves from the
thraldom of mind and habit to which their
chains have debased them, and to fit them for
the enjoyment of freedom. Amongst the
most wretched conditions to which man is
subject, is that where he is turned out upon
a society for which he is unprepared, either
by education, by habits, or by association, and
left at large to follow his own unregulated pro-
pensities. No small share of forbearance and
virtue is required amongst those who have
lately been masters, to sustain the progress
of a revolution which appears in perhaps a
maority of cases, to injure rather than benefit
those that are liberated. But humanity is
consoled in some degree by the certainty that
like most revolutions, though the process is
painful, the result must ultimately be benefi-
cial to both parties.