This was the title of Dr. Channing’s book. It rendered the antislavery cause services so important that I am impelled to give a further account of it. It seemed to me at the time, it seems to me now, one of the most inconsistent books I have ever read. It showed how, all unconsciously to himself, the judgment of that wise man had been warped and his prejudices influenced by the deference, which had come to be paid pretty generally throughout our country, to the Southern slaveholding oligarchy; and by the denunciations which their admirers, sympathizers, abettors, and minions in the free States, poured without measure upon Mr. Garrison and his comparatively few fellow-laborers. Dr. Channing’s profound respect for human nature and the rights of man, and his heartfelt compassion for the oppressed, suffering, despised, were such that he could not but see clearly the essential, inevitable, terrible wrongs and evils of slavery to the master as well as to his subject. He portrayed these cruelties and vices so clearly and forcibly that the pages of his book contain as utter condemnations of the domestic servitude in our Southern States, and as awful exposures of the consequent corruption, pollution of families and the community in those States,--condemnations as utter and exposures as awful as could be found in _The Liberator_. To his chapters on “Property in Man,” “Rights,” and “Evils of Slavery,” we could take no exceptions. But his chapter entitled “Explanations” seems to us, as Mr. Garrison called it, a chapter in _recantation_,--a disastrous attempt to make it appear as if there could be sin without a sinner. He says that the character of the master and the wrong done to the slave are distinct points, having little or no relation to each other. He therefore did not “intend to pass sentence on the character of the slaveholder.” Jesus Christ taught that “by their fruits ye shall know men.” But the Doctor said in this chapter, “Men are not always to be interpreted by their acts or their institutions.” “Our ancestors,” he continued, “committed a deed now branded as piracy,” i. e. the slave-trade. “Were they, therefore, the offscouring of the earth?” No,--but they were _pirates_, their good qualities in other respects notwithstanding. They were guilty of kidnapping the Africans, and made themselves rich by selling their victims into slavery. Piracy was too mild a term for such atrocious acts. They were just as wicked before they were denounced by law as afterwards. And it was by bringing the people of England and of this country to see the enormity of the crimes inseparable from that trade in human beings, that they were persuaded to repent of it, to renounce and abhor it. Again Dr. Channing says under this head, “How many sects have persecuted and shed blood! Were their members, therefore, monsters of depravity?” I answer, their spirit was cruel and devilish, utterly unlike the spirit of Jesus. They were none of his, whatever may have