“If there was a meaner or more damnable business than capturing people to sell them as slaves I have not heard of it. The horrors of the whole business from beginning to end was awful. The details were sickening and makes one ashamed of humanity. Such things are enough to make men skeptical, whether God watches over the events of the world. The most astounding part of it is that Christian people claimed it was for the Glory of God! ‘O, religion! What crimes have been committed in thy name!’ “Did you ever think of the power of profits in controlling the tastes, judgments and consciences of mankind? “Slavery was confined mainly to the southern states and created a different kind of people and a different condition of society from that of the northern states. These owners of their fellow men, traffickers in human flesh and blood, claimed to be gentlemen, as they did not have to labor for a livelihood. They assumed to be the aristocracy of the whole country and so affiliated with the aristocracy of England. They certainly had much in common. Both despised labor for themselves, but enjoyed it in others for their sole benefit. These aristocrats of the South, with plenty of money they never earned, could be educated, travel abroad and acquired a kind of culture with pride and arrogance, while they treated the poor whites among them as ‘trash,’ not much better than their ‘niggers,’ just as the aristocracy in England treat the lower classes. All was game to them within their reach. Nearly every boy over fifteen had his wench and the owners of slaves, like a lustful aristocracy, gave free reign to their fancies and desires, and did not scruple even to sell their own flesh and blood in the auction slave marts as they sold their cattle and cotton. “It is not surprising then, that the aristocracy of the South and of England should have similar tastes and a liking for each other. The result was that in our civil war, waged solely on account of slavery, our worst enemies were the aristocracy of England. They would have swallowed African slavery, head and tail, with all its abominations for the sake of aiding their fellow aristocrats. It is to the middle class, the working people of England, that we are indebted for the non-recognition of the southern confederacy as an independent government. As it was, armed vessels were built and fitted out in the ports of England to destroy our commerce and with the connivance of her government. This was her way of being neutral.