8

selling them as slaves. New England, and with her Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, should institute a day for national fasting and humiliation for this disgraceful practice; and the recollection of it (assuming that it is only a recollection) should stop their mouths, when they are disposed to indulge in any tall talk about the negro.

But if this kidnapping does not go on any longer, it is thanks, not to the conscience of the North, but to the opposition of the South. The Southern States have acted on this point with singular unanimity. It is considered in all of them an offence of the deepest dye, and is punished with a severity which even to us seems rather surprising. Most of them visit it, as Maryland does, with either fine or imprisonment, or both the amount of one, and the duration of the other, varying in the different communities. the two States, which I should call the representative States, exact more than that. By the laws of South Carolina, the offender receives a sound flogging. Virginia has made the penalty for it death; and she has been followed by Alabama.

But

The truth is, that the Southern States have been really desirous to get rid of slavery. In the Convention which founded the Constitution, the speakers who condemned the institution most strongly were Southerners; and any attempts at legislating in fa

vour of it were on the part of the Northerners. The utmost that the South did in its behalf was to protect against any interference with State rights which legislating on the subject might entail. I will give an example. There was a proposal to prohibit the slave-trade by an article in the Constitution of the Union. South Carolina voted against it, on the express ground that it was not a subject for Federal legislation at all; and that this was her reason bona fide, and not a hypocritical pretence, she showed by passing an Act in her State Legislature to forbid that trade in the very same year.

The laws of Virginia betray something like a nervous anxiety to diminish, at least to prevent the increase of, the slaves within her borders. She not only prohibits, as Maryland does, the introduction of slaves except as the property and for the use of bona fide residents, but provides, even in the case where it is permissible, that the importer, for every slave that he thus introduces, shall export a young slave woman (between ten and thirty years old), within three months. I do not know that this regulation was a very good one from the negro's point of view, but at any rate it disposes of the charge of breeding slaves for the market, of which Virginia is accused by the inventive genius of New England, and which was stated once in Parliament by no less a person

than Lord Palmerston-not uncontradicted, how

ever.

I think it is very likely that slavery would, by degrees, have disappeared, at least from what are called the Border States-i. e., Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas-by the same process which had carried it out of the North. It is true there was not the same reason for getting rid of it as there was in the North, because negro labour was not impossible in the Border States; but, on the other hand, neither was white labour, at least generally—and of the two sorts the latter was that which Virginia and her sisters preferred. What was to have been done with the slaves would have been a difficulty, in the teeth of the stringent laws which South Carolina and her sisters, the Gulf States, had passed against their introduction; but it is not unlikely, considering the wide extent of land which they had not population enough to occupy, that some arrangement might have been entered into for the advantage of all parties. In the Gulf States, I do not see how slavery could have been dispensed with. The climate would not admit of white labour; and the example of Jamaica was not encouraging to try that of the blacks, unless in the capacity of slaves.

Something might have been done, and may still,

to elevate the blacks to a state fit for freedom, but that would be an affair of time. I think it may fairly be laid to the credit of the Southern States that they have done their best in that direction. The condition of a slave is one of the steps by which the negro may be lifted from the level of the African blacks to that of men who can be supposed to take part in the government of their country; and the laws of the Southern States have lifted them much more than half-way. The average negro of Georgia or Louisiana is far nearer to the condition of a voter in a Presidential election, than he is to that of a subject of the King of Dahomey; so, perhaps, having done so much, the Southerners may do more. In the mean time they can hardly be blamed very much for not emancipating at once. To do so would be to reduce their country to a jungle, and themselves to paupers.

I wish as far as possible to keep clear of the question of slavery in the abstract; and I have only been induced to write on it at all, because there has been so much nonsense talked about it, de part et d'autre, that I have been tempted to say more about it than I intended. On the anti-slavery side there has been, if not mendacity, something very like it; and on the proslavery side there has been at least a false philosophy. I will show what I mean. I feel I am rash in trying to do so. But the question ought not to be blinked.

As to the first, without entering into the raw-head and bloody-bones stories, which find favour in the eyes of those who like that sort of thing, and which probably contain ninety per cent of falsehood to ten per cent of truth, I will take one instance of what is said against the South. It is asserted that, in Louisiana, it is the practice of the masters to work their slaves to death in order to save the expense of keeping them after they are superannuated; and this is not brought as a charge against individuals, but is said to be the custom of the State. Now, this assertion is in a sense true, and in a sense false; and it is difficult to say in which sense the making of the charge implies the greatest effrontery. As far as the Southern masters are concerned, it is false. And it is remarkable that, while all, or nearly all, the States of the Confederacy have laws regulating the conduct of masters to their slaves, prescribing due attention to be paid to their health and comfort, and prohibiting cruelty, the most stringent and exacting in this way are those of this very Louisiana.

But while the negroes of the State of Louisiana, speaking generally, are perhaps the happiest and the best looked after of those of the whole Confederacy, there is one part of the dominions of that State with regard to which the assertion is perfectly true; and that part is the part occupied by the Federal armies.