That bar-keeper would probably have sold
his own child and its slave mother at a
dollar profit, and have thought himself
justified in so doing. Indeed, one of the most
horrible features in this most horrible traffic
is the fact that fathers sell their children,
and brothers their brothers, without thought
or care; that fathers and brothers do worse
than sell to another master their daughters
and sisters; that all natural duties are
violated, and all natural boundaries
overpassed. In no other country, and under no
other condition of slavery, have such things
been done before. In Mohammedan slavery,
natural ties are respected as sacredly as the
most perfectly legal ties, and the moralities
of society are regarded and enforced from
bond as well as from free. But in America,
the slave has no morality to regard. He has
no nature in common with the rest of
humanity; he is ranked with beasts of toil
and burthen, and his life is modelled on
theirs under the necessary modifications of
his human nature. He has no wife: he has a
partner. A woman has no children; she
brings forth young who belong to the master.
Husband and wife, after they have gone
through the mockery of a marriage-ceremony
and have had children together, may be
separated at a moment's notice; the wife will be
forced to accept another husband, so as to
have more children, and the husband will
choose another wife. Slave-owners would
as soon think of preserving conjugal fidelity
among their sheep and horses as among
their slaves. The farmer who sells his calf,
and the planter who sells the suckling
from the mother's breast, act with exactly
the same feeling, and from the same motive.
Both believe their gain to be superior to
the laws of nature, and regard as property
what God gave to freedom. This has
never been in any age of the world's
history before. Judaism, the Greek and
Roman times, Mohammedanism, all recognised
the rights of nature in their slaves.
Christianity is the only faith whose
professors have violated and destroyed these
rights; yet Christianity is the only faith
whose essential element has been human
equality.

Slave testimony not being received in
America, is, like all natural injustice,
beginning to work reflective evil. In several
instances where the testimony of a slave
would be most valuable, the law steps in, and
by its suicidal enactment nullifies justice.
Slave-owners feel this so much, that many of
them are considering the propriety of
admitting coloured testimony; in self-defence,
and for self-interest; not for equity. Yet such
a step would meet with violent opposition, as
recognising the possession of intellectual
perceptions in slaves; at present denied and
refused to them. It is but fair that wrong
should recoil on the head ot the wrong-doer;
and this is essentially the case at present in
America. By denying the negro the
imprescriptible rights of humanity, the slaveowner
has but increased his own anxiety and
losses. Instead of intelligent, self-reliant
men, he has wished for ignorant machines;
instead of servants, he has asked for slaves,
and now he finds that his machines go
wrong without such incessant overlooking as
makes life one long day of toil, and that his
slaves do not in very truth, serve him. The
evil he has done to others has come back on
himself; he has sown the wind, he is now
reaping the whirlwind.

Still, the question of emancipation is as
difficult as ever; though its solution is not,
perhaps, as far off as ever. Virginia and
Washington are approaching that solution, but very
gradually; and it will be long before the
like influences spread farther southward. By
the introduction of free white labour, in
connection with the gradual emancipation of
individuals and small groups, and their
consequent moral, social, and intellectual
elevation used as examples, the difficulty seems
to us in a fair way of being in the distant
future overcome. Again we say, convince
the planter that slavery is unprofitable,
and slavery is at an end. If a native
Virginian can confess, as one who wrote to
the editor of the New York Daily Times,
that "where you would see one white labourer
on a northern farm, scores of blacks should
appear on the Virginian plantation, the best
of them only performing each day one-fourth
a white man's daily task, and all requiring
an incessant watch to get even this small
modicum of labour," we may be sure that
many others feel the same disadvantage and
the same distress. The Rev. E. J. Stearns,
of Maryland, shows by an elaborate calculation,
in his criticism on Uncle Tom's
Cabin, that in Maryland the "cost of a
negro at twenty-one years of age has been
to the man who raised him eight hundred
dollars. Six per cent, interest on this
cost, with one and three quarters per
cent. for life insurances, per annum, makes
the lowest wages of a negro, under
the most favourable circumstances, sixty-two
dollars a year, or five dollars a month,
paid in advance in the shape of food and
clothing."

Slave-holding is degrading to both master
and slave, despite the sophistries of the
south to show its mercy and its value. The
better class of planters— acknowledging the
bitter truth that the institution which they
defend so warmly is a degradation to themselves
— send their children to be educated in
the north: they confess that the influence of
slavery demoralises the young freeman as
much as the negro himself; and what greater
condemnation than this can a father or a
citizen pronounce?

Let us hope that though slowly we are
certainly approaching the end of slave
times. The blind violence of its partisans,