“Not often, but occasionally; and so occasionally a white man commits an offence in order that he may be put in the penitentiary. A poor negro is emancipated or escapes. He goes to Philadelphia or New York, and has a hard time getting his grub. In a year or two he drifts back to his old master’s plantation, anxious to be received again by one who can insure to him his rations of mush; and so he declares there’s no place like ‘old Virginny for a nigger.’ Then what pæans go up in behalf of the patriarchal system! What a conclusive argument this that ‘niggers will be niggers,’ and that slavery is right and holy! Slave-drivers catch at the instance to stiffen up their consciences, and to stifle that inner voice that is perpetually telling them (in spite of the assurances of bishops, clergymen, and literary _dilettanti_ to the contrary) that slavery is a violation of justice and of that law of God written on the heart and formulized by Christ, that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us, and that therefore liberty is the God-given right of every innocent and able-minded man. Instances like that I have supposed, instead of being a palliation of slavery, are to my mind new evidences of its utter sinfulness. A system that can so degrade humanity as to make a man covet repression or extinction for his manhood must be devilish indeed.” “But, Mr. Onslow, do not statistics prove that the blacks increase and multiply much more in a state of slavery than in any other? Is not that a proof they are well treated and happy?” “That is the most hideous argument yet in favor of the system. In slavery women are stimulated by the beastly ambition of contending which shall bear ‘the most little nigs for massa’! Among these poor creatures the diseases consequent upon too frequent child-bearing are dreadfully prevalent. Surely the welfare of a people must be measured, not by the mere amount of animal contentment or of rapid breeding with which they can be credited, but by the sum of manly acting and thinking they can show. A whole race of human beings is not created merely to eat mush, hoe in cotton-fields, and procreate slaves. The example of one such escaped slave as Frederick Douglas shows that the blacks are capable of as high a civilization as the whites.” “Do they not seem to you rather feeble in the moral faculty?”