n with a
large family, in which case he may perhaps delegate to them the
honourable occupations, above named. Surely there is something a little
puritanical in the prohibition. To hold a slave is one thing, but to
employ the labour of one who is a slave, and over whose hopes of freedom
you have no control, is quite another thing; and I hold that, under the
actual circumstances, the employment of another's slave could never he
so distorted in argument as to bring home a charge of connivance in a
system we so thoroughly repudiate.

Go to the East, follow in imagination your ambassadors, ministers, and
consular authorities. Behold them on the most friendly terms--or
striving to be so--with people in high places, who are but too often
revelling in crimes, with the very name of which they would scorn even
to pollute their lips; and I would ask, did such a monstrous absurdity
ever enter into any one's head as to doubt from these amicable relations
whether the Government of this country or its agents repudiated such
abomination of abominations? If for political purposes you submit to
this latter, while for commercial purposes you refuse to tolerate the
former, surely you are straining at a black gnat while swallowing a
beastly camel. Such, good people of the Foreign-office, is my decided
view of the case; and if you profit by the hint, you will do what I
believe no public body ever did yet. Perhaps, therefore, the idea of
setting the fashion may possibly induce you to reconsider and rectify an
absurdity, which, while no inconvenience to you, is often a very great
one to those you employ. It is wonderful, the difference in the view
taken of affairs by actors on the spot and spectators at a distance. A
man who sees a fellow-creature half crushed to death and crippled for
life by some horrible accident, is too often satisfied with little more
than a passing "Good gracious!" but if, on his returning homeward, some
gigantic waggon-wheel scrunch the mere tip of his toes, or annihilate a
bare inch of his nose, his ideas of the reality of an accident become
immensely enlarged.

Let the Foreign Secretary try for a couple of days some such _regime_ as
the following:--

5 A.M. Light fires, fetch water, and put kettle on.
6 " Dust room and make beds.
7 " Clean shoes, polish knives, and sand kitchen.
7:30 " Market for dinner.
8:30 " Breakfast.
9 " To Downing-street, light fires, and dust office.