A rude, uncultivated fugitive slave was driven, by stern necessity, to that country to which young American gentlemen go to increase their stock of knowledge, to seek pleasure, to have their rough, democratic manners softened by contact with English aristocratic refinement.
Douglass contrasts his desperate flight to England as an escaped slave with the privileged reasons young American gentlemen typically traveled there.
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Pardon me, therefore, for urging upon you, my people, the importance of saving your earnings; of denying yourselves in the present, that you may have something in the future, of consuming less for yourselves that your children may have a…
Put us in Kansas or in Africa, and until we learn to save more than we spend, we are sure to sink and perish.
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.