The Society had thus undertaken as great an amount of work as it could perform. The field was broad enough, truly, for an association that hoped to obtain an income of but five to ten thousand dollars a year, and realized annually an average of only $3,276 during the first six years of its existence. It did not include the destruction of American slavery among the objects it labored to accomplish. That subject had been fully discussed; the ablest men in the nation had labored for its overthrow; more than half the original States of the Union had emancipated their slaves; the advantages of freedom to the colored man had been tested; the results had not been as favorable as anticipated; the public sentiment of the country was adverse to an increase of the free colored population; the few of their number who had risen to respectability and affluence, were too widely separated to act in concert in promoting measures for the general good; and, until better results should follow the liberation of slaves, further emancipations, by the States, were not to be expected. The friends of the Colonization Society, therefore, while affording every encouragement to emancipation by individuals, refused to agitate the question of the general abolition of slavery. Nor did they thrust aside any other scheme of benevolence in behalf of the African race. Forty years had elapsed from the commencement of emancipation in the country, and thirty from the date of Franklin's Appeal, before the society sent off its first emigrants. At that date, no extended plans were in existence, promising relief to the free colored man. A period of lethargy, among the benevolent, had succeeded the State emancipations, as a consequence of the indifference of the free colored people, as a class, to their degraded condition. The public sentiment of the country was fully prepared, therefore, to adopt colonization as the best means, or, rather, as the only means for accomplishing any thing for them or for the African race. Indeed, so general was the sentiment in favor of colonization, somewhere beyond the limits of the United States, that those who disliked Africa, commenced a scheme of emigration to Hayti, and prosecuted it, until eight thousand free colored persons were removed to that island--a number nearly equaling the whole emigration to Liberia up to 1850. Haytien emigration, however, proved a most disastrous experiment.