All the nice manipulations in surgery, in the arts, in painting, statuary, and the thousands of delicate fabrics seen every day and all about us, demand both intellect and delicacy of hand, and these, too, in that complete perfection found alone in the Caucasian. The sense of touch, on the contrary, in the negro is not in the hand or fingers, or only partially so, but spreads all over the surface and envelops the entire person. The hand itself, in its mere mechanism, is incompatible with delicate manipulation. The coarse, blunt, webbed fingers of the negress, for example, even if we could imagine delicacy of touch and intellect to direct, could not in any length of time or millions of years be brought to produce those delicate fabrics or work those exquisite embroideries which constitute the pursuits or make up the amusements of the Caucasian female. The mechanism of the negro hand, the absence or rather the obtuseness of the sense of touch in the fingers, and the limited negro intellect, therefore, utterly forbid that negroes shall be mechanics, except it be in those grosser trades, such as coopers, blacksmiths, etc., which need little more than muscular strength and industry to practice them. But the sense of touch, though feeble in the hand or fingers, is none the less largely developed as are the other senses of the negro, and spreads over the whole surface of the body. This is witnessed every day at the South, where whipping, as with Northern children, is the ordinary punishment of negroes. As in all other foolish notions that spring from the one great misconception—that negroes have the same nature as white people, the “anti-slavery” people of the North and of Europe labor under a ludicrous mistake in respect to this matter. They take their notions of flogging from the practice of the British army and the Russian knout, where strong men are cut to pieces by the “cat” or beaten to death by clubs, and they suppose that precisely similar barbarity is practiced on the “poor slave.” And the runaway negro has doubtless added to these notions, perhaps, without meaning it. At Abolition conventicles he is expected, of course, to horrify the crowd with awful tales of his sufferings, but having always had plenty to eat and never overworked, he has really nothing to fall back on but the “cruel whippings,” which the imaginations of the former readily transform into their own notions, but which, in fact, correspond to that which they deal out to their own children without a moment’s compunction. The sensibility of the negro skin closely resembles that of childhood, and while there are doubtless cases of great barbarity in these respects, as we all know there are in cases of children, the ordinary flogging of negroes is much the same as that which parents, guardians, teachers, etc., deal out to white children, and the “terrible lash” so dolefully gloated over by the ignorant and deluded usually dwindles down into a petty switch in reality.