ulgar license--license to work
from rosy morn to dark midnight for the most scanty pittances--license
to store up wealth in the hands and for the benefit of the few--license
to bellow lustily for rival politicians--license to send children to
ragged schools--license to sot in the ale-house--license to grow lumpish
and brutal--license to neglect the offices of religion, to swear, to
lie, to blaspheme--license to steal, to pander unchecked to the coarsest
appetites, to fawn and slaver over the little great ones of the
earth--license to creep like a worm through life, or bound through it
like a wild beast; and, last and most precious of all--for it is
untaxed--license to starve, to rot, to die, and be buried in a foetid
pauper's grave, on which the sweet-smelling flowers, sent to strew the
pathway of man and woman with beauty, love, and hope, will refuse to
grow, much less bloom."

Setting aside all exaggerations, who does not recognise in the foregoing
quotations "the galled jade wincing"? Were the writer a kind owner of
slaves, he might have replied to _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ by facts of
habitual kindness to them, sufficient to prove that the authoress had
entered into the region of romance; but in his recrimination he
unconsciously displays the cloven hoof, and leaves no doubt on the mind
that he writes under the impulse of a bitterly-accusing monitor within.
It would be wasting time to point out the difference between a system
which binds millions of its people in bondage to their fellow-man, a
master's sovereign will their only practical protection, and a system
which not only makes all its subjects equal in the eye of the law, and
free to seek their fortunes wherever they list, but which is for ever
striving to mitigate the distress that is invariably attendant upon an
overcrowded population. Even granting that his assertions were not only
true, but that they were entirely produced by tyrannical enactments,
what justification would England's sins be for America's crimes? Suppose
the House of Commons and the Lords Temporal and Spiritual obtained the
royal sanction to an act for kidnapping boys and grilling them daily for
a table-d'hote in their respective legislative assemblies, would such an
atrocity--or any worse atrocity, if such be possible--in any respect
alter the question of right and wrong between master and slave? Let any
charge of cruelty or injustice in England be advanced on its own simple
grounds, and, wherev