Charles E. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe compiled from her letters and journals by her son Charles Edward Stowe

[166] these girls belong; it will show more than words can the kind of incident to which I allude. The tract is not a published document, only printed to assist me in raising money, and it would not, at present, be for the good of the parties to have it published even in England.

But though these things are known in the free States, and other things, if possible, worse, yet there is a terrible deadness of moral sense. They are known by clergymen who yet would not on any account so far commit themselves as to preach on the evils of slavery, or pray for the slaves in their pulpits. They are known by politicians who yet give their votes for slavery extension and perpetuation.

This year both our great leading parties voted to suppress all agitation of the subject, and in both those parties were men who knew personally facts of slavery and the internal slave-trade that one would think no man could ever forget. Men united in pledging themselves to the Fugitive Slave Law, who yet would tell you in private conversation that it was an abomination, and who do not hesitate to say, that as a matter of practice they always help the fugitive because they can't do otherwise.

The moral effect of this constant insincerity, the moral effect of witnessing and becoming accustomed to the most appalling forms of crime and oppression, is to me the most awful and distressing part of the subject. Nothing makes me feel it so painfully as to see with how much more keenness the English feel the disclosures of my book than the Americans. I myself am blunted by use — by seeing, touching, handling the