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>thers, to hold females in slavery, is necessarily fatal to the purity of a people; that unprotected females, stripped by their degraded condition of woman's self-respect, should be used to minister to other passions in men than the love of gain, is next to inevitable." *If this assertion is warranted by the moral condition of society as displayed before him, may we not find in it a solution of the fact, that those who have been reared up under all the influences of slavery on the master, are far less frequently found to fall into the odious cohabitation with the negro than are those who have

not.

However, we have among us some very wicked and debased men, who own slaves, and who have been born and educated in the midst of the influences of the institution of slavery, and who yet cohabit with their female negroes. But the moral sense of the community, from day to day and from year to year, more and more distinctly gives reproof, more and more emphatically points to such the finger of contempt and scorn, and continues to increase in energy, expressing its loathing and abhorrence; and all this is taking place under the influences of slavery on the master. Do all these things give proof that slavery is the progenitor of this debasement, or the reverse?

Dr. Channing was mistaken; his mind was in error: he substi tuted the consequent for the cause.

We deem it useless to spend time or argument with those who will pertinaciously deny and refuse to listen to facts, unless they shall be in support of their previously conceived views or prejudices. We are aware that the numerical proportion which we have ascribed to what we call "a floating population" may seem incredible to those in other countries, where the facts are quite different. Yet we are sure that such estimate is within the truth.

Here, as everywhere else, the government, the legislative power of the country, is in the hands of the permanent and more elevated and wealthy classes; in the hands of slave-owners. Would such a class consent to laws throwing difficulties in the way of emancipation, if the effect of such laws were to be expended on their own offspring? To the more elevated and cultivated class of community in any country (and here such are all slave-owners) is to be ascribed the tone of moral feeling. Does any man covet for himself the loathing and scorn of community?

The family of the slave-owner is taught to regard the negro as a race of man radically inferior, in moral capacity, in mental

power, and even in physical ability, to the white man; that, although he is susceptible of improvement in all these things, and even does improve in the state of slavery to the white man, yet that it would require untold generations to elevate him and his race to the present standing of the white races.

The child, the mere youth, and those of more experience, see proofs of these facts in every comparison. The master feels them to be true, and is taught, that, while he governs with compassion, forbearance, and mercy, and as having regard to their improvement, any familiarity on terms of equality, beyond that of command on his side, and obedience on theirs, is, and must be, disgrace to him. He is taught to consider the negro race, from some cause, to have deteriorated to such extent that his safety and happiness demand the control of a superior; he regards him as a man, entitled to receive the protection of such control; and that he, like every other man, will be called to account unto God, according to the talents God has given him. He is taught, by every hour's experience, to know that slavery to the negro is a blessing. He is taught to feel it a duty to teach, as he would an inferior, the negro his moral duty, his obligations to God, the religion of the Bible, the gospel of Christ.

But the man born and educated in the Free States is taught that "he who cannot see a brother, a child of God, a man possessing all the rights of humanity, under a skin darker than his own, wants the vision of a Christian." Channing, vol. ii. p. 14. "To recognise as brethren those who want all outward distinctions, is the chief way in which we are to manifest the spirit of him who came to raise the fallen and save the lost." Ibidem.

Vol. ii. pp. 20, 21, 22, he says-" Another argument against property (in slaves) is to be found in the essential equality of men."

* * * "Nature indeed pays no heed to birth or condition in bestowing her favours. The noblest spirits sometimes grow up in the obscurest spheres. Thus equal are men ;-and among these equals, who can substantiate his claim to make others his property, his tools, the mere instruments of his private interest and gratification?" * * * "Is it sure that the slave, or the slave's child, may not surpass his master in intellectual energy, or in moral worth? Has nature conferred distinctions, which tell us plainly who shall be owners and who shall be owned? Who of us can unblushingly lift up his head and say that God has written 'master' there? Or who can show the word 'slave' engraven

on his brother's brow? The equality of nature makes slavery a wrong."

May we aid the disciples of Dr. Channing by referring them to Prov. xvii. 2, "A wise servant (y ebed, slave) shall have rule over a son that causeth shame, and shall have part of the inheritance among the brethren?" And will the doctor and his disciples believe the proverb any the more true, when we inform them that it is a matter of frequent occurrence in slave-holding communities. Vol. v. p. 89, 90, he says-"But we have not yet touched the great cause of the conflagration of the Hall of Freedom. Something worse than fanaticism or separation of the Union was the impulse to this violence. We are told that white people and black sat together on the benches of the hall, and were even seen walking together in the streets! This was the unheard-of atrocity which the virtues of the people of Philadelphia could not endure. They might have borne the dissolution of the national tie; but this junction of black and white was too much for human patience to sustain. And has it indeed come to this? For such a cause are mobs and fires to be let loose on our persons and most costly buildings? What! Has not an American citizen a right to sit and walk with whom he will? Is this common privilege denied us? Is society authorized to choose our associates? Must our neighbour's tastes as to friendship and companionship control our own? Have the feudal times come back to us, when to break the law of caste was a greater crime than to violate the laws of God? What must Europe have thought, when the news crossed the ocean of the burning of the Hall of Freedom, because white and coloured people walked together in the streets?

"Europe might well open its eyes in wonder. On that continent, with all its aristocracy, the coloured man mixes freely with his fellow-creatures. He sometimes receives the countenance of the rich, and has even found his way into the palaces of the great. In Europe, the doctrine would be thought to be too absurd for refutation, that a coloured man of pure morals and piety, of cultivated intellect and refined manners, was not a fit companion for the best in the land. What must Europe have said, when brought to understand that, in a republic, founded on the principles of human rights and equality, people are placed beyond the laws for treating the African as a man. This Philadelphia doctrine deserves no mercy. What an insult is thrown on human nature, in making it a heinous crime to sit or walk with a human being, whoever it may

be? It just occurs to me, that I have forgotten the circumstance which filled to overflowing the cup of abolitionist wickedness in Philadelphia. The great offence was this, that certain young women of anti-slavery faith were seen to walk the streets with coloured young men !"

Such are the lessons taught the youth as well as the aged of the Free States, even by Dr. Channing himself. We now ask, under the teachings of which school will the pupils be the best prepared for this cohabitation with the negro?

The burning of the Hall of Freedom was, no doubt, a very great outrage, well meriting severe condemnation. Yet we cannot but notice, that Dr. Channing has nowhere, in all his works, said one word about the burning of the Convent on Mount Benedict, by his own townsmen, the good people of Boston.

We care not with what severity he punishes such outrages. But it is the influence of his lesson in palliating the familiarity, and mitigating the evil consequences of a coalition of the white man with the negro, that we present to view. It is with grief that we find him infusing into his disciples this nauseating, disgusting, moral poison; preparing their minds to feel little or no shame in a cohabitation with the negro, so degrading to the white man, and so disgraceful in all Slave States. Yea further, what are we to think of the judgment, of the taste,-may we not add, habits, of a man who could unblushingly publish to the world his partiality to the negro of Jamaica, after his visit there, as follows:

"I saw too, on the plantation where I resided, a gracefulness and dignity of form and motion, rare in my own native New England." Vol. vi. p. 51.

Again, page 52. "The African countenance seldom shows that coarse, brutal sensuality which is so common in the face of the white man."

May we be pardoned for feeling a strong desire,-rather, a curiosity, to be made acquainted with the faces of the white men with whom he was the most familiar!

LESSON VIII.

IN vol. ii. page 82, Dr. Channing says—

"I cannot leave the subject of the evils of slavery, without saying a word of its political influence."

He considers that "slave labour is less productive than free." This is doubtless true; and if so, it proves that the master of the slave does not require of him so much labour as is required of a hired labourer. Are the friends of abolition angry, because, in their sympathy for the slave, they have found something to be pleased with?

He considers that "by degrading the labouring population to a state which takes from them motives to toil, and renders them objects of suspicion or dread," impairs "the ability of a community to unfold its resources in peace, and to defend itself in war."

This proposition includes the idea that the Slave States have degraded a portion of their citizens to a state of slavery. This is not true. Our ancestors, contrary to their will, were forced to receive a degraded race among them, not as citizens, but slaves;and does it follow now, that we must again be forced to make this degraded race our political equals? Even the British Government, with all its claim to sovereign rule, never dreamed of imposing on us a demand so destructive to our political rights; so blighting. to social happiness; so annihilating to our freedom as men; so extinguishing to our very race. Do the friends of abolition deem us so stupid as not to see, if, even when the negro is in slavery, cases of amalgamation happen, that, when he shall be elevated to political freedom, the country would, by their aid, be overspread by it? Do they think that we do not see that such a state of things is degeneracy, degradation, ruin, worse than death to the white men? And will they chide, if, in its prevention, we drench our fields in our own blood in preference? The British Government urged the race here as an article of property, of commerce and profit, as they did their tea. They stipulated, they guaranteed them to be slaves, they and their posterity for ever-not citizens! On such terms alone could they have been received. The South then, as now, to a man would have met death on the battle-field, sooner than have suffered their presence on other conditions.

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