ongs to the negro, and these inflammable publications were calculated
to lead them on to make the effort. But what reflecting mind can fail to
foresee the horrors consequent upon such a hopeless endeavour? More
especially must it have presented itself to the mind of the
slave-masters; and could they, with sure visions before their eyes of
the fearful sacrifice of human life, the breaking-up of whatever good
feeling now exists between master and slave, and the inauguration of a
reign of terror and unmitigated severity--could they, I say, with such
consequences staring them in the face, have taken a more mild, sensible,
and merciful step than checking that education, through the
instrumentality of which, the abolitionists were hastening forward so
awful a catastrophe?

The following extract may suffice to prove the irritation produced by
the abolitionists in Virginia, though, of course, I do not pretend to
insinuate that the respectable portion of the community in that State
would endorse its barbarous ravings:--

"SLAVERY IN THE SCHOOL-ROOM.--The (American) _Richmond Examiner_, in
connexion with the recent trial of Ward of Kentucky, has the following
theory on the extinction of schoolmasters in general:--'The South has
for years been overrun with hordes of illiterate, unprincipled graduates
of the Yankee free schools (those hot-beds of self-conceit and
ignorance), who have, by dint of unblushing impudence, established
themselves as schoolmasters in our midst. So odious are some of these
"itinerant ignoramuses" to the people of the South; so full of
abolitionism and concealed incendiarism are many of this class; so full
of guile, fraud, and deceit,--that the deliberate shooting one of them
down, in the act of poisoning the minds of our slaves or our children,
we think, if regarded as homicide at all, should always be deemed
perfectly justifiable; and we imagine the propriety of shooting an
abolition schoolmaster, when caught tampering with our slaves, has never
been questioned by any intelligent Southern man. This we take to be the
unwritten common law of the South, and we deem it advisable to
promulgate the law, that it may be copied into all the abolition papers,
thundered at by the three thousand New England preachers, and read with
peculiar emphasis, and terrible upturning of eyes, by Garrison, at the
next meeting of the anti-slavery party at Faneuil Hall. We repeat, that
the shooting of itinerant abolition schoolmas