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Show 4A NOTES ON doubt the melioration would go on much more rapidly. Let Northern men consider this, and act accordingly. "Kind families get in debt, an(l the la.ws of om· country nllow them to sell tho child out of its mother's bosom to pe1y its master's debts." (1). 'rhis accusation Uoes not come next in the order of the na.rrati\'C, but I take it up next bcca.usc of its connection with the foregoing. I am sorry to say tha.t in most of the slave States it is too true; and I ~1m sorry, too, to be obliged to add, that it is equally trnc that such works as Uncle Tom's Cabin, do more than all other causes put together, to perpetuate the wrong. :Moreover, its admission into tho work is gratuitous, for the object of the work is, as. ~ h~vc before remarked, to show the necessary cruelty and InJUStice of the system of slavery, and this has no necessary co_nnection with the system, as is proved by the fact that It has been prohibited in Lousiana. for more than twenty yca.rs, under the severest pena.lties, and that in the other States, the Courts of Equity will net countenance it. (Sec Appendix, E. 8.) "And she "Was whipped, sir, for wanting to livo a decent Christian life, such as your laws give no slave girl a right to live." (5.) . . . If this means that the law docs not prohibit the en me referred to, it is untrue. (Sec Appendix, E. 9.) But if it means that the la.w is not omniscient and omnipresent, and therefore not omnipotent, that is an imperfection which it labours under, in common with all things human. Besides, the proper question is, not whether certain things happen (in spite of the laws) under the system of slavery, but whether they would cease to happen, or happen less frequently in a state of freedom ; nml this question has hecn answered for us m Jamaica (sec Appendix, G. 1,) and recollect that the statement there given is made by one of the Editors of the New York Evening Post, a thorough-going Free-Soil pttpCI',) and the UNCLE TOM'S CAfliN. 45 answer npplies not only to the paragraph quotell above, but to what is sn.itl elsewhere about the sale of "beautiful Quadroon girls," and it is a. full answer to it. "Dut now what? .,\Vhy, now comes my master, takes me right away from my work, and my fricnJs, and all I like, ancl grinds me down into the very dirt ! And why? Because, he says, I forgot who I was; he says, to teach me that I am only a nigger! After all, and last of all, he comes between me and my wife, antl says I shall give her up, and live with another woman. And all this your la.ws give him power to do in spite of God or man." (G.) As to the first pal"\ of this charge, if the cruelty is of " definite and tangible kind, the laws of Kentl.te~y, as well as tlw other slave States, provide a. remedy, (sec Appendix, E . 4 ;) and if it is not, it comes under the remarks on extract (2). As to the last charge, it is simply untrue: the laws in question give the master no such power. "'n10 feeling, I iring, bleeding, yet immortal thing, which American State law coolly classes with the bundles, and bales, and boxes, among which she is lying." (8.) If this means that the classification is, in the eye of the law, an exhaustive one, in other words, that this is the only ca.tcgory untlcr which the law puts the slave, it is not true, and if it docs not mean this, it is aside from the purpose. Let 11s make a slight c·hange in the languu.ge :-" 'rhe feeling, living, immortal things which the Northern farmer eoolry classrs with the implements they wic\J, calling them his lumds." Docs he mean 1hereby that they have no souls, and no heads? So our auth;r's logic(!) would i1lfcr; but so docs not the logic of common sense. lJor certain purposes, man is a. thing, as really as for certain other purposes, he is a. person: the powers of naturc,-firc and r~·ost, the ocean and the tempest treat him ns a thing, "coolly classing him with the bundles, and bales, and boxes among which he is lying_;" |