er, therefore, sat discontentedly down, with his little
account-book, and put down the missing body and soul under the head of
_losses!_

"He's a shocking creature, isn't he,--this trader? so unfeeling! It's
dreadful, really!"

"O, but nobody thinks anything of these traders! They are universally
despised,--never received into any decent society."

But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened,
cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader
is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the
public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves
him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

Are you educated and he ignorant, you high and he low, you refined and
he coarse, you talented and he simple?

In the day of a future judgment, these very considerations may make it
more tolerable for him than for you.

In concluding these little incidents of lawful trade, we must beg the
world not to think that American legislators are entirely destitute of
humanity, as might, perhaps, be unfairly inferred from the great efforts
made in our national body to protect and perpetuate this species of
traffic.

Who does not know how our great men are outdoing themselves, in
declaiming against the _foreign_ slave-trade. There are a perfect host
of Clarksons and Wilberforces* risen up among us on that subject, most
edifying to hear and behold. Trading negroes from Africa, dear reader,
is so horrid! It is not to be thought of! But trading them from
Kentucky,--that's quite another thing!

* Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846) and William Wilberforce (1759-
1833), English philanthropists and anti-slavery agitators
who helped to secure passage of the Emancipation Bill by
Parliament in 1833.

CHAPTER XIII

The Quaker Settlement

A quiet scene now rises before us. A large, roomy, neatly-painted
kitchen, its yellow floor glossy and smooth, and without a particle
of dust; a neat, well-blacked cooking-stove; rows of shining tin,
suggestive of unmentionable good things to the appetite; glossy green
wood chairs, old and firm; a small flag-bottomed rocking-chair, with
a patch-work cushion in it, neatly contrived out of small pieces of
different colored woollen goods, and a larger sized one, motherly and
old, whose wide arms breathed hospitable invitation, seconded by the
solicitation of its feather cushions,--a rea