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Show • I ---..... -· 72 NOTES ON in slavery;* n.nd even where tl1cy arc free, their freedom is a. curse to them, a.ncl not a. blessing. 'l'hosc slaYes at the South who belong to the harde8t masters, and arc moBt rigo1'0U8l!J trcntcd, rare far Letter on· than the freest native inhabitants of "\Vestcrn Africa; and the average conUition of the Southern sbvcs is infinitely preferable to the average conUition of the "\Vest-African negro, bond or free. All this, no doubt, will sountl very stnwgc to Northern ears: it would have sounded so to 10inc twenty years ago. It is not the teaching of New England school-books. The children there grow up untlcr the impression that the slaves at the South go regularly to their work under the lash, with every ucrrc of cndura11Ce strained to its utmost tension. ':rhey have read the words of Cowper,-what schoolboy has not reatl them ?- those glowing words:- "Thus m:w devote>; his brother, and destroy~; And worse than all, anJ most to be deplored As human nature's broadest, foulest blot, Ch:<ins him, and tasks him, and exacts hit~ sweat With 8tripcs, that mm·o.v, with fL bleeding heart, 'Veeps w!1cn she sees inflicted on f\ beast:"- nnd tbcy h"'·e Iuken tl>cm for gospel, and thought them literally applicable to the southern slaveholder. True, they have learned better ns they have grown up, but t11Cir early imp1·ession still clings to them and exercises a powerful influence over them. It jg wi th them very much as it was with a class-mate of mine whom I recollect to have met in Virginia, the year after we graduated. "\Yhy," said he, "when I was at Cambridge, I always felt as though the Unitarians were the mojorit,v, not only 1 here, but· everywhere. rrruc, when I r eflected, I knew it was not so, but, then, I did not reali~e it. And now, I have come here in *Of the fifty millions that inhabit tha.t cJntincnt, forty millions are slaves to the other tcu. UXCLJ·; TO.'l'S CAlllX. 73 Virginia, and they hardly think a Unitarian a human being." ~rhis shows how early impressions tyrannize over us, even when wo know them to be false. The Northern people know that their early impression of the physical condition of tbe negro is unfounded, and yet they can't rid themselves of it. I say, they know it is unfounded. Now and then, some greenhorn revives some old exploded fable, but only they believe it who are as green as he. Tho anti-slavery orators have dropped the physical condition of the negro from their list of topics: it no longer makes up tbe staple of their harangues. They know, if they know anything about tho matter, that the negro is, as a general thing, far better off, physically, than the English day-labourer ;-that he works less, is fed better, and has more relaxation. Mr. Senator Sumner, in the spcecb already quoted, speaks of slavery (p. 7,) as a power, "which, amidst a plallsible pltysical comfort, degrades man, created in the divine image, to the level of a beast." Mr. Horace Mann, in his speech before the llouso of Representatives last August, when asked by 1\![r. Mason, (p. 7 ,) Arc not our slaves better off, both mentally and physically, than any three millions of negroes ever were in Africa? instead of speaking out like a man, squirms and wriggles through a whole column of circumlocution, because he could not answer the question in the negative, and would not answer It in tho affirmative. The London 'l'imes, of September 1st, with commendable straight.forwardness, speaks thus upon the point: "The efforts made in the South to improve tho condition of the slave show at ]cast that humanity is not dead in the bosoms of tbe propriCtors. Mrs. Stowe has certainly not done justice to this br~nch of the subject. Horrors in connection with slavery - Itself a horror- unquestionably exist; but a1l accounts-save her own, and those of writers actuated by her extreme 10 G |