But while the buying of slaves for domestic, or field service, was legitimate, the man who pursued the traffic as a business, and purchased merely to sell again, was despised. He was termed a "nigger-buyer," and was a pariah in the lowest sense of ostracism. It was claimed that there was a distinction with a very great difference. Three or four servants for ordinary household duties were deemed sufficient. On a farm more hands were needed, and the plantations further south required several hundred. The refractory slave of Kentucky and the border states, was sold "down the river" in commercial parlance, where the discipline of the rice, sugar, and cotton plantations kept in check his evil inclinations. There might have been cases of cruel punishment, but the rule was kindness--if for no other reason, the master would not injure that which stood for money, for property. The expense of keeping slaves was enormous. Where is the laborer of to-day who is furnished his house, clothing, doctors, medicine, and not a little pocket money on occasions? The South employed her laborers to produce the great staple of cotton, which was to clothe mankind. They were properly clothed, fed and made comfortable. In addition, they were cared for when sick, and there existed the warmest affection for the majority of them. The world can nowhere show human beings as care-free in bondage as were the negroes of the ante-bellum days. Judge the Southern owner by the rule and not the exception. As well judge a town by its halt, maimed, blind, diseased and lawless citizens, as the slave owners by occasional acts of oppression to be found on the plantations. But it was the "Down east" Yankee overseer who was cruel--not the master. It was the African in New England who was denied religious teaching, and even baptism. There was no sympathy there, to quote from a writer, for the poor creatures transplanted from their native sunny clime, dying by hundreds from disease on the bleak Northern shores. It was merely a question of profit and loss. They were sold to the South as fast as they could be shipped. Even when the great hue and cry for freedom led the Northern Senators to legislate for the cessation of foreign slavery in 1808, these great philanthropists rushed over some 5,000 slaves to sell to the South before the limited date could come around. Many prominent rich men of New England made their money by this traffic, then pulled a long face of condemnation for the Southern planter, whose money had been paid over to swell the Northern coffers. IT IS WORTHY OF NOTE THAT THE SOUTH NEVER OWNED OR SAILED A SLAVE SHIP. In 1861 Mr. C.C. Glay, of Alabama, made a bitter speech in the United States Senate. Part of his arraignment was that not a decade had passed that the North had not persecuted the South on account of her slaves.