'_The power of the master_,' says the Judge, '_must be absolute to render the submission, of the slave perfect_. I most freely confess my sense of the harshness of this proposition. I feel it as deeply as any man can. And as a principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it. But in the actual condition of things it must be so. There is no remedy. This discipline belongs to the state of slavery. They cannot be disunited without abrogating at once the rights of the master, and absolving the slave from his subjection. It constitutes the curse of slavery to both the bond and the free portion of our population. But it is _inherent in the relation_ of master and slave. That there may be particular instances of cruelty and deliberate barbarity where, in conscience, the law might properly interfere, is most probable. The difficulty is to determine where _a court_ may properly begin. Merely in the abstract, it may well be asked which power of the master accords with right. The answer will probably sweep away all of them. But we cannot look at the matter in this light. The truth is we are forbidden to enter on a train of general reasoning on the subject. _We cannot allow the right of the master to be brought into discussion in the courts of justice. The slave, to remain a slave, must be made sensible that there is no appeal from his master, that his power is, in no instance, usurped, but is conferred by the laws of man, at least, if not by the laws of God._' Such is slavery under the slave code. Men are sometimes better and sometimes worse than their laws. We need not wonder that volumes might be filled with recitals of cruelties and atrocities of torture, ending, in many cases, only with the death of the victim. Nor need we wonder at the more loathsome moral abominations so prevalent in Southern society, which degrade the whites even more than the blacks--of children begotten by masters upon the persons of their slave women--begotten in lust and sold for gain; of beautiful quadroons and octoroons sought and bought for the base pleasure of their owners; of families, where the lawful wives and daughters of the master are served by slaves that are their own uncles, brothers, or sisters, born of slave women, yielding to the master's lustful will. _Amalgamation is a Southern, not a Northern taste and practice._ The most abominable case that has recently come to light, is that of the young slave mother, at New Orleans, of whose children her own father (a rich rebel) was the father! All these things are inevitably incident to a state of slavery, and there is no law against them.