“That depends on what you may esteem advantages. Can an injustice be an advantage to the perpetrator? The man who betrays a moneyed trust, and removes to Europe with his family, may in one sense derive an advantage from the operation. He may procure the means of educating and amusing himself and his children. So the slaveholder, by depriving other men of their inherent rights, may get the means of benefiting himself and those he cares for. But if he is content with such advantages, it must be because of a torpid, uneducated, or perverted conscience. Patrick Henry was right when he said, ‘Slavery is inconsistent with the religion of Christ.’ O’Connell was right when he declared, ‘No constitutional law can create or sanction slavery.’ I have often thought that Mississippians would never have been reconciled to that stupendous public swindle, politely called repudiation, if slavery had not first prepared their minds for it by the robbery of labor. And yet we have men like Jefferson Davis,[16] who not only palliate, but approve the cheat. O the atrocity! O the shame! With what face can a repudiating community punish thieves?” “Shall we not,” asked Vance, “at least grant the slaveholder the one quality he so anxiously claims,—that which he expresses in the word _chivalry_?” Mr. Onslow shrugged his shoulders, and replied: “Put before the chivalrous slaveholder a poor fanatic of an Abolitionist, caught in the act of tampering with slaves, and then ask this representative of the chivalry to be magnanimous. No! the mean instincts of what he deems self-interest will make him a fiend in cruelty. He looks upon the Abolitionist very much as a gunpowder manufacturer would look upon the wandering Celt who should approach his establishment with a lighted pipe in his mouth; and he cheerfully sees the culprit handed over to the tender mercies of a mob of ignorant white barbarians.” “Do you, then, deny that slavery develops any high qualities in the master?” “And if it did, what right have I to develop my high qualities at another’s expense? Yes! Jefferson is right when he says: ‘The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and his morals undepraved by such circumstances.’”