THE QUESTION.

Considerable pains are taken to keep the question respecting the Canterbury School from coming fairly before the public. The following extract from Mr. May’s letter to Andrew T. Judson, Esq. presents it in the true light.

Nothing, I am confident, could have been further from Miss Crandall’s intention, than to do her neighbors any injury. And Sir, you may rest assured, the gentlemen referred to in her Advertisement would not uphold her a moment in violating any of your rights. The determination she has formed to devote herself to the education of colored females, we cannot but highly approve. Her residence in your village is altogether a providential circumstance. We should encourage her benevolent enterprise, wherever it might be undertaken. And if a suitable situation can be provided for her, in some place where her neighbors would assist and cheer her, or where they would only not molest her, we should rejoice to have her remove thither. But you declared, in the town meeting, that the school should not be located in any part of Canterbury—and also that there is not a town in the State which would admit such a seminary within its borders. It is therefore all the more necessary that she should be sustained where she now is. It is to be deeply regretted that yourself and others are opposed to her. We think you are doing yourselves no honor; and more than that, we are persuaded you are helping to perpetuate the great iniquity, and the deep disgrace of our country. The question between us is not simply whether thirty or forty colored girls shall be well educated at a school to be kept in Canterbury; but whether the people in any part of our land will recognize and generously protect the “inalienable rights of man,” without distinction of color? If this be not done, in Connecticut, where else in our land can we expect it will be done, at least in our day? That it cannot be done even in this State without a struggle, is not most shamefully obvious. A year or two since, some benevolent individuals proposed to erect an institution, at New Haven, for the education of colored young men. The design was defeated by violent opposition. If the citizens had opposed merely its location in that City, they might have escaped condemnation, for such a seminary there might have been very prejudicial to Yale College. But it was only too apparent, that their hostility to the institution was peculiarly embittered by their prejudices against the color of those, who were to be educated at it. So too in the case at Canterbury; no one pretends there would have been any opposition to Miss Crandall’s school, if her pupils were to be white. The tincture of their skin then it is which has called out the men of influence in array against her; and has even procured from the freemen of the town an expression of their “unqualified disapprobation” of her plan.

Here then, in Connecticut, we have had two recent instances of outrage committed upon “the inalienable rights of man.” Among these rights, to use the language of the Declaration of Independence “are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Now Education has from the first, been regarded in this State highly conducive to private happiness, and the public weal. Yet have our colored brethren been twice angrily denied permission to seek this blessing, to the extent they have desired. Will the people of Connecticut generally, countenance these violation of our civil and religious principles? If they will, let them no longer claim to be a republican, much less a christian people!