The reader probably feels by this time, that if we speak truth, then was slavery a very different thing practically from its usual picture abroad. He will perhaps feel with a shade of skepticism, that it is strange the world should have been so much mistaken. The chief explanation we offer of so strange a fact, is that trait of abolitionists, our interested and unscrupulous accusers, predicted by St. Paul: ("men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth.") The world will find them out in due time: the statements made of the events of the late war have done much to unmask them. Still another cause is that Europeans, and even Yankees, are so ignorant of Southern society. Still another explanation is, that slavery in the British colonies, from which the people of that Empire have chiefly derived their conceptions, actually was far more harsh and barbarous than in this country. The reader is emphatically cautioned that he must not judge slavery in Virginia by slavery in Jamaica or Guiana. Whether the charge of the great Paley is correct, who accounts for this difference by the greater harshness of British character,[89] politeness may forbid us to decide. But the comparative fates of the Africans in the British colonies, and those in our States, tell the contrast between the humanity of our system, and the barbarity of theirs, in terms of indisputable clearness. If political science has ascertained any law, it is that the well or ill-being of a people powerfully affects their increase or decrease of numbers. The climate of the British Indies is salubrious for blacks. Yet, of the one million seven hundred thousand Africans imported into the British colonies, and their increase, only six hundred and sixty thousand remained to be emancipated in 1832. The three hundred and seventy-five thousand (the total) imported into the Southern States, had multiplied to four millions. Such is the contrast! How grinding and ruthless must have been that oppression which in the one case reduced this prolific race, in the most fertile and genial spots of earth, in the ratio of five to two! And how generous and beneficent that government which, in the Southern States, nursed them to a more than ten-fold increase, in a less hospitable and fruitful clime! Well may we demur to have the world take its conceptions of our slavery from the British. [Footnote 89: Moral Philosophy, Bk. 3, p. 2, Ch. 3: "The inordinate authority which the plantation laws confer upon the slaveholder, is exercised by the _English_ slaveholder, especially, with rigour and brutality."]