'Not shore, Cunnel, but she can't stand, and the blood _will_ run. I reckon a hun'red and fifty ar done for thar, sartin.' 'D---- the money--I'll make that right. Go to the house and get some ointment from Madam--she can save her--go at once,' said my host. 'I will, Cunnel,' replied the dirt-eater, taking his broad-brim from the wooden peg where it was reposing, and leisurely leaving the cabin. Making our way over the piles of rubbish and crowds of children that cumbered the apartment, the Colonel and I then returned to the carriage. 'Dogs must be rare in this region,' I remarked, as we resumed our seats. 'Yes, well-trained bloodhounds are scarce every where. That dog is well worth a hundred and fifty dollars.' 'The business of nigger-catching, then, is brisk, just now?' 'No, not more brisk than usual. We always have more or less runaways.' 'Do most of them take to the swamps?' 'Yes, nine out of ten do, though now and then one gets off on a trading-vessel. It is almost impossible for a strange nigger to make his way by land from here to the free States.' 'Then why do you Carolinians make such an outcry about the violation of the Fugitive Slave Law?' 'For the same reason that dogs quarrel over a naked bone. We should be unhappy if we couldn't growl at the Yankees,' replied the Colonel, laughing heartily. '_We_, you say; you mean by that, the hundred and eighty thousand nabobs who own five sixths of your slaves?'[4] [4: The statistics given above are correct. That small number of slaveholders sustains the system of slavery, and has caused this terrible rebellion. They are, almost to a man, rebels and secessionists, and we may cover the South with armies, and keep a file of soldiers upon every plantation, and not smother this insurrection unless we break down the power of that class. Their wealth gives them their power, and their wealth is in their slaves. Free their negroes by an act of Emancipation, or Confiscation, and the rebellion will crumble to pieces in a day. Omit to do it, and it will last till doomsday. The power of this dominant class once broken; with landed property at the South more equally divided, a new order of things will arise there. Where now, with their large plantations, not one acre in ten is tilled, a system of small farms will spring into existence, and the whole country be covered with cultivation. The six hundred thousand men who have gone there to fight our battles, will see the amazing fertility of the Southern soil--into which the seed is thrown and springs up without labor into a bountiful harvest--and many of them, if slavery is crushed out, will remain there. Thus a new element will be introduced into the South, an element that will speedily make it a loyal, prosperous, and _intelligent_ section of the Union.