we have no wholesale murders. No passenger has lost life on the oldest road. It's stock is among the very few at par. 66 66 Our traveller is not content with looking around now and finding all barren from Dan to Beersheeba, in the Southern States, but he peers into the future and " guesses and fears" for them. The people of the South, he thinks, are blinded by education and habits and supposed self interest" to the evils and horrors of their situation; and he, understanding their interest better than themselves, and exempted by the atmosphere" of England from all prejudice and blindness, kindly undertakes to put them on their guard. He makes a calculation by which he satisfies himself that, some time or other, the blacks of the slave states will outnumber the whites, and then he predicts the deluge. But in the ancient slaveholding States the slaves outnumbered the freemen, five or ten to one, as calculations vary. In South Carolina the negroes have been more numerous than the whites for fifty years. In all the lower country of the South, the slaves are five or six fold more in number thau the masters. There is not a company of regular soldiers from the sea-board to the mountains. On certain plantations there are a thousand negroes under the charge of one white man. Yet there is no apprehension. This may be the consequence of "blindness." But we have no emeutes. In ancient Attica the four hundred thousand slaves produced much good, but little evil to the thirty thousand freemen. They never gave occasion to any serious disturbance. We apprehend nothing except from the foolish or malignant interference of outsiders. They can do mischief any where. How long would the mills of Manchester, or the work shops of Birmingham, or the banks of London and Paris be safe, if all troops were removed, and cunning and knavish demagogues whispered seductive lies, day after day, in the ears of the "white slaves" that constitute the labouring masses? The traveller thinks that the people of the South fear discussion. He is mistaken. They fear the secret machinations of factious demagogues only, or the wanton, mischievous interference of selfcomplacent foreigners. He admits that the planters are willing to give every opportunity for investigation. We think he overstates the matter when he says there is "universal anxiety" to do so. There is universal readiness. When an Englishman especially, comes among them with the character and claims of a gentleman, they think it a part of the courtesy due to him, to offer opportunities for investigating a subject which is occupying his mind, evidently more than any other. Of this he may be assured always, that the attentions of his entertainers in this matter proceed from no desire to defend themselves from any supposed belief of his that they murder or maim their slaves. This is the motive suggested by Dr. Mackay. Such a belief on the traveller's part, might exclude him from the society of Southern gentlemen; it certainly would not conciliate their attentions. What is done for the traveller is for his information, not for the slaveholder's defence. Whether the opportunities so presented are ever candidly used, may be well doubted. The traveller is alive to whatever may confirm his preconceived opinions; he is blind to every thing else. What he is compelled to see and admit produces no effect. He answers facts with a phrase, and puts by conviction with a sneer. The author of "Life and Liberty in America" is as fair, perhaps, as can be expected. But as his countrymen are noted all over Europe for being more accustomed to dogmatize than examine, it should not be surprising if our travelling Doctor of Laws is not altogether free from the national failing. To misapprehend and misrepresent an argument is a natural consequence of this supercilious humour. We will furnish an example. Dr. Mackay professes to give an account of a pro-slavery answer he had met with to an English Review. "The Westminster Review," as he tells us, "cited, among other objections to slavery, that it demoralizes the slave owner far more than the slave, and that slavery was to be condemned for the same reason that induced Parliament to pass a law against cruelty to animals." A pro-slavery writer, he continues, replied by saying, "very true, but did the British legislature go so far in their zeal as to decree the manumission of horses?" And, as if this was a triumphant answer to all objections, the pro-slavery writer, he says, leaves the Reviewer "with no farther reply." We have been enabled by a friend to lay our hands on the proslavery argument, and on the article of the Review. It may be seen, by a reference to them, that what is marked by Dr. Mackay as a quotation from the first, is no quotation at all, and that the "Review " is not citing, among other objections, the one answered, but is insisting on that one as the only one on which the whole question at issue must be considered as resting. In an article on another subject, the Reviewer goes out of his way to expatiate, in an argument against slavery, as resting on one position alone, "the ultimate ground," on which "ground precisely" moralist and legislator, he insists, must take their stand. He declares that it would make no difference if the negroes were apes; that.slavery is to be abolished for the same reason, and no other, for which we prosecute the man who maltreats his ox or horse. The pro-slavery writer takes the position as the Reviewer makes it, and replies accordingly. If the evils are precisely the same, why are the remedies so entirely different? Why does the British Parliament prohibit the abuse only, allowing the use, of the horse, and prohibit the use as well as abuse of the slave? Why respect the property of the cabman and take away that of the slaveholder? If to release the negro from labour be judged the most certain way to secure him from the cruelty of his owner, it is the most certain way for the horse also; why not set him free from harness? If it makes no difference whether the slaves be negroes or apes, should apes be turned loose to prevent the possible cruelty of their owners? Carlyle intimates that the sentimentalists of Great Britain will one day claim freedom for the Houyhnhums, and rightly too, if the Reviewer's reasoning is carried out to its legitimate conclusions. Dr. Mackay thinks the above inference from the Reviewer's position "tremendous logic." We think his account of the matter "tremendous misrepresentation," as much so at least as false quotation and one sided statements are able to make it. And yet it is a fair specimen only of the manner in which all British travellers treat the subject of slavery in the United States-an off-hand arrogant fashion, that dis dains fact or reasoning, and begins discussion with assuming that their opinion of the matter in dispute is unquestionably true. The whole question of labour is subject, indeed, to laws beyond the control of sentimental travellers, demagogues, or philanthropists.They may do mischief by their interference, they have done a great deal, but they can never do good. Whether bondsmen or hired men shall cultivate the soil of Jamaica, does not depend on the assemblies of Exeter Hall. They may stop cultivation; they cannot change the form of labour necessary to conduct it. They may make an idle soldier of the freed negro, but they cannot make him a tiller of the soil for wages. At every attempt, he will continue "to eat his yams and to snigger at the buckra." Hayti, as she is, will become more and more a wilderness; restore slavery, and, in twenty years, she would rival the prosperity of Cuba. The question of labour is one of climate and production. Civil laws, as in New England, affirm only the prior decisions of nature. It will be so throughout the United States. The negro slave, then, is as well clad, fed and cared for, as moral, as well educated, as much protected by law and public opinion, as the hired man of Europe. If he has subsistence and not wages, if his labour is transferred from one to another by others and not by himself, he is compensated in the certainty of employment and of bread. He has as much as the hired man, and has it more secure. This covers the entire ground of comparison between the hired man and the bondsman, considered as a class. In addition to this, if it be clear that manumission converts the negro from an efficient laborer into a drone, as he is in Jamaica, that it would ensure his destruction ultimately in the United States, the whole question as a practical one is at rest. There is no reply, except that to which the anti-slavery man is always ready to resort-There will be no intermeddling by hard words and abusive language. When the abolitionists can say no more, they strive to spite the master by reviling the slave. When they call negro slaves "human cattle" and "chattel labourers," and pigs, sheep, or poultry, they merely confess that they have nothing more to say. The honest slave is a better man than his scornful contemners. Rhetorical phrases on the ideality of liberty and the dignity of freedom, can have little weight coming, as they do, from the employers of naked, starving, homeless, ignorant and demoralized labourers, and framed, as they are, for the printing office, not the hovel-for the occupant of the drawing room, not the night tenant of a stray cask. They have nothing to do with toil and its sufferings. Federal or State Governments, unless it be, to give expression to what other laws shall have previously decreed. Where climate requires the slave's labour, it will continue; where the hired man can toil, the white will drive out the black. The process is going on daily. Legislation can and will do little to advance or retard it. In the mean time, it may calm and soothe the tender hearts of gentle philanthropists, to be assured, that between the hired man and the bondsman, the white labourer and the black, there is not much to choose, in food, clothing, dwelling, morals, religion, education, contentment or happiness. The slave, at least, has nothing to envy in the condition of his brother labourer, and does not envy him. Let our English friends attend to their own social miseries, and leave the slaveholder to manage his. In doing so, they will violate no law of gentlemanly propriety or Christian charity, while they conform to a homely and wholesome adage, which directs every one to attend to his own affairs and not to meddle with those of his neighbour. "Why should we not love the young? There are many fair things under the heavens; but I know of nothing fairer, purer, and more pleasing to look upon, than a well taught child, or an unsullied youth. Look upon these little onesthese unwinged birds of Paradise! There is no cloud upon their brows, but the reflection of God's light, a sunset from Eden! How attentively and yet how free from care, they look into this uncertain and stormy life!-for they have yet found no storm, but a passing breeze;—the sun does not set on their transient sorrows and care finds no anchor-ground in their hearts." "It must always be remembered, that the actions of public men will be subjects of thought to a future period, when interest is stifled and passion is silent; when fear has ceased to agitate, and discord is at rest, and when conscience has resumed its sway over the human heart. Nothing but what is just, therefore, can be finally expedient, because nothing else can secure the permanent concurrence of mankind." "Absolute monarchies have rendered despotism odious; let us take care that democratic republics do not re-establish it. "Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can." WHO TOOK IT? To find one's self suspected of ing spot, I lighted upon Sandford, thieving is extremely disagreeable a pleasant little town on the Conto an honest man, as I happen to know by experience. If there is any conceivable personage who is capable of suffering still more keenly under this immoral imputation, I am inclined to think that he must be the actual thief. I will tell my story, and leave the reader to judge which of these two characters is the least to be envied. For the last twenty-six yearsthat is to say, ever since I was born-I have lived in Stockbridge, Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Stockbridge is a very nice place, but every now and then I get tired to death of it, and feel that for some mysterious reason, probably not worth investigating, the town and I ought to get quit of each other for a week or a fortnight. Students of geography will guess, without being told, that it is I who go away, and not Stockbridge. Sometimes I make for the Vermont brooks, and amuse the Green Mountain boys by fishing whole days after trout, and coming back to my lodgings at night with an eel, or perhaps three or four shiners. Sometimes I go to Saratoga and quarrel with the "gentlemanly proprietor," because he gives me a room only eight feet square in a hotel which covers several acres. In general I travel to the sea side, pick out a pretty beach with a small village attached, and stay there swimming and boating until I begin to think that I can get tired to death of other places as well as of my dear natal earth. This last summer, while seeking for a good and perfectly new bath necticut shore, about ten miles west of New Haven. As I am not a political economist, nor a philosopher of any other species, I cannot say whether Sandford is lucky or unlucky in being an old-fashioned community, and I confine myself to stating the fact with all the positiveness of which I am capable. It has no railroad, no factories, no newspaper and no academy. There are five or six respectable old families which intermarry, while all the rest of the inhabitants are very common people, who look up to and hate the aforesaid. The landlord is the son of the former landlord, and is one of the leading personages in the township. These are the usual marks, I believe, of old-fashioned villages in New England. It was evening when I got out of a rumbling, tumbling stagecoach, and, carpet-bag in hand, entered the Sandford Hotel. I was greeted by a portly individual, dressed in black, with grey whiskers, a baldish head, and a spacious physiognomy, placid and shining, as if with cold cream made from the milk of human kindness. "Your servant, sir," said he, shaking hands with me. "Will you have tea, sir, or be shown to a room?" "Room first," returned I, "and then tea, if you please, Mr. Mr." 66 Galpin, sir," he interposed. "It's been Galpin these seventy years. My father kept the house fifty-five years, and I have had it fifteen." |