A few years since a “slave” woman escaping from Kentucky to Ohio was recognized and taken back to her home, but on the way down the river cut the throat of her child, whom she had carried off in her flight. The Abolitionists, of course, admired and praised this bloody deed, and declared that, rather than her child should live a slave, she, with Roman sternness and French exaltation, herself destroyed its life. If they had said that the mother had killed her child because it was not permitted to have a white skin, or straight hair, or to have any other _specialty_ of white people, it would have been quite as rational and as near the truth as to say that she killed it because it was not to grow up with the freedom of the white man. The woman was doubtless a mulatto or mongrel, who in revenge possibly for the supposed wrong, inflicted this punishment on those whom she had been taught to believe had wronged her. But while this unnatural crime was quite possible, as indeed any unnatural vice or crime is always possible to the mixed element, it is scarcely possible to the negress, whose imperative maternal instinct, as has been observed, shields her from such atrocity. The negro mother has always control and direction of her offspring at the South so long as that is needed by the latter. The master, of course, is the supreme ruler—the guide, director, the common father, the very providence of these simple and subordinate people, but while his is the directing power that sees to all their wants, and protects them in all their rights, the relations of mother and child are rarely interfered with, for both the interests of the master and the happiness of the mother demand that she should have the care and enjoy the affection of her own offspring. This, however, is confined to a limited sphere when contrasted with the instinctive habitudes and enlarged intellectualism of our own race. The negro child, in some respects, at the same age, is more intelligent than the white child. This same fact is manifested by our domestic animals. The dog or calf of six months is vastly less dependent on the mother than the human creature. The negro child, with its vastly greater approximation to the animal, is also less dependent at a certain age than the white child. As frequently stated in this work, the negro has absolutely nothing in common with animals that our own race has not.