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the same conductor admitted a colored woman into the cars without making any objection.
This improved state of things continued several weeks.
But the old tyrannical system was restored, owing to counteracting influence from some unknown quarter.
I often met colored people coming from the country in the Harlem cars; but I never afterward knew one to enter from the streets of the city.
Many colored people die every year, and vast numbers have their health permanently impaired, on account of inclement weather, to which they are exposed by exclusion from public conveyances.
And this merely on account of complexion!
What a tornado of popular eloquence would come from our public halls, if Austria or Russia were guilty of any despotism half as mean!
Yet the great heart of the people is moved by kind and sincere feelings in its outbursts against foreign tyranny.
But in addition to this honorable sympathy for the oppressed in other countries, it would be well for them to look at home, and consider whether it is just that any well-behaved people should be excluded from the common privileges of public conveyances.
If a hundred citizens in New-York would act as Friend Hopper did, the evil would soon be remedied.
It is the almost universal failure in individual duty, which so accumulates errors and iniquities in society, that the ultratheories, and extra efforts of reformers become absolutely
Boston, J. P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington; London; Low and Company, 1854.
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