Morning Star

For the Morning Star.

While travelling a few days since on board of a rail road car, with a rapidity almost bidding defiance to the speed of old time, I was led to meditate on the very great improvement in travelling by the use of steam.

In bringing to mind some of the useful and wonderful inventions of man, I thought truly, "he is fearfully and wonderfully made" and from the vast resources of thought, aided by science, the field of improvement is yet boundless before him. While thus reflecting, I beheld, seated in the midst of a well dressed and respectable company of white people, a colored man. Nothing, in his appearance, could, to any one, be exceptionable, but the color of his face. His downcast eye revealed to me the feelings of his heart—that there he deeply felt that many there were, even in this land of boasted freedom, who could, with no pleasant emotions, behold the negro raised to the level of a man: and that in respectable society they would have him appear only in the character of the servant. Notwithstanding such might reasonably have been his feelings and reflections. I viewed that a vast change had already been effected in public sentiment in favor of the colored man: and his presence in a rail road car of that class was an encouraging omen. My mind was carried back to the first subject of meditation, and as great as I viewed the improvement in travelling by steam, I viewed the improvement in the moral condition of the negro and of our country too, which is about being effected by the mild, yet powerful efforts of philanthropists, to be of much more importance and calculated to produce better and more lasting effects.

The thought that the organ of the F. W. Baptists is one of the small number which strenuously and consistently advocates that the colored man has RIGHTS as well as the white man, caused in my breast what then appeared to me almost justifiable pride.

M. J. M.
Monmouth, Me., June 29, 1840.