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Show 78 a man may, home is the centre to which his heart turns. The thought of his home nerves his arm and lightens his toil. For that his heart yearns, when he is far off. There he garners up his best treasures. God has ordained for all men alike the highest earthly happiness, in providing for all the sanctuary of home. But the slave's home does not merit the name. ·ro him it is no sanctuary. It is open to violation, insult, outrage. His children belong to another, are provided for by another, are disposed of by another. The most precious burden with which the heart can be charged, the happiness of his child, he must not bear. He lives not for his family, but for a stranger. He cannot improve their lot. His wife and daughter he cannot shield from insult. They may be torn from him at another's pleasure, sold as beasts of burden, sent he knows not whither, sent where he cannot reach them, or even interchange inquiries and messages of love. To the slave marriage has no sanctity. It may be dissolved in a moment at another's will. His wife, son, and daughter may be lashed before his eyes, and not a finger must be lifted in their defence. He sees the scar of the lash on his wife and child. Thus the slave's home is desecrated. Thus the tenderest relations, imended by God equally for all, and intended to be the chief sprinQ'S of happiness and virtue, are sported with wantonly and cruelly. What outrage so great as to enter a 79 man's house, and tear from his side the beings whom God has bound to him by the holiest ties? Evet·y man can make the case his own. Every mother can bring it home to her own heart. And let it not be said that the slave has not the sensibilities of other men. Nature is too strong evE.'ll for slavery to conquer. Even the brute has the yearnings of parental love. But suppose that the conjugal and parental ties of the slave may be severed without a pang. vVhat a curse must be slavery, if it can so blight t~e heart with more than brutal insensibility, if it can sink the human mother below the polar she-bear, which " howls and dies for her sundered cub ! " But it does not and cannot turn the slave to stone. It leaves, at least, feeling enough to make these domestic wrongs occasions of frequent and deep suffering. Still it must do much to quench the natural affections. c;n the wife, who has been brought under influences most unfriendly to female purity and honor, who is exposed to the w\1ip, who may be torn away at her master's will, and whose support and protection are not committed to a husband's faithfulness, can such a wife, if the name may be given her, be loved and honored as a woman should be ? Or can the love, which should bind together man and his offspring, be expected, under an institution, which subverts, in a great degree, filial dependence and parental authority and care? Slavery withers the |