In Maryland and Delaware the Quakers were rapidly emancipating their slaves, and the strong reaction that had set in among the thoughtful men of the South began to threaten the institution. Men felt that it was a curse to the slave, and poisoned the best white society of the slave-holding States. As early as 1781, Mr. Jefferson, with his keen, philosophical insight, beheld with alarm the demoralizing tendency of slavery. "The whole commerce," says Mr. Jefferson, "between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unrelenting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it--for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive, either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally, it is not sufficient. The parent storms; the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose tongue to the worst of passions, and, thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the _amor patriae_ of the other!"[11] And what was true in Virginia, as coming under the observation of Mr. Jefferson, was true in all the other States where slavery existed. And indeed it was difficult to tell whether the slave or master was injured the more. The ignorance of the former veiled from him the terrible evils of his condition, while the intelligence of the latter revealed to him, in detail, the baleful effects of the institution upon all who came within its area. It was at war with social order; it contracted the sublime ideas of national unity; it made men sectional, licentious, profligate, cruel,--and selfishness paled the holy fires of patriotism. But notwithstanding the profound reflection of the greatest minds in the South, and the philosophic prophecies of Jefferson, the conscience and heart of the South did not respond to the dictates of humanity. Cotton and cupidity led captive the reason of the South, and, once more joined to their idols, the slave-holders no longer heard the voice of prudence or justice in the slave marts of their "section." FOOTNOTES: [10] Jefferson's Writings, vol. viii, p. 404. [11] Jefferson's Writings, vol. viii. p. 403. CHAPTER V. ANTI-SLAVERY METHODS.