Reviewing the effects of a close social union, from infancy upwards, between white children and their slave companions, who are seldom endowed with shame or modesty, we are led to remark that, without desiring to make any insinuations against the natural capacity for moral and intellectual improvement observable among all the races of mankind, or wishing in any degree to depreciate the merit of individuals of pure or mixed African and slave descent, we think it may be truly affirmed, that even minds of a naturally amiable and delicate bias, when led habitually to accommodate themselves to the grovelling feelings and propensities of the more degraded portion of our kind, undergo deterioration by degrees, and slide into a participation of the qualities of a baser nature, with which they inevitably amalgamate their own. The proper medium of domestic intimacy allowable between masters and slaves, may be a nice matter to determine with precision; but it may be said in general, that in proportion as this immediate intercourse may meliorate the condition, and quicken the intelligence, of the slave, it tends to lower the tone of morality in that society where slavery is tolerated. Thus, we doubt not, the standard of morals is lowered, and we conceive it may be owing to this very alloy of character that, until very lately, the sheer ruffian was seldom met with, even among the lowest of the dark septs in the voluptuous capital of Peru. Assassinations, it must be owned, have been rather frequent of late years, and these have been almost always perpetrated with impunity; but there is reason to believe that the agents concerned in such atrocious crimes were in many instances not sons of the soil, but outcasts and fugitives from neighbouring states. Money, not blood, is what the worst of the dark native vagabonds of the coast are generally in quest of; and he who does not offer resistance when accosted by the robber, but, instead of armour, carries a few dollars or a couple of doubloons for his ransom, may nine times in ten be suffered to escape with entire personal safety from the midst of the most lawless marauders and dreaded highwaymen, who are usually no other than renegade slaves. CHAPTER VI.