shows that they treat him with suspicion and harshness.
Consequently, he at once dreads and hates them; but he will never harm
them by violent means. Too degraded to be desperate, he is only
thoroughly depraved. His miserable career will be short; rheumatism and
asthma are conducting him to the work-house; where he will breathe his
last without one pleasant recollection, and so make room for another
wretch, who may live and die in the same way." And this description, or
some other not much less revolting, is applied to "the bulk of the
people, the great body of the people." Take the following description of
the condition of childhood, which has justly been called eloquent.[241]

"The children of the very poor have no young times; it makes the very
heart bleed, to overhear the casual street talk between a poor woman and
her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition
rather above the squalid beings we have been contemplating. It is not
of toys, of nursery books, of summer holidays, (fitting that age,) of
the promised sight or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of
mangling and clear starching; of price of coals, or of potatoes. The
questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity
in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has
come to be a woman, before it was a child. It has learnt to go to
market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing,
acute, sharpened; it never prattles." Imagine such a description applied
to the children of negro slaves, the most vacant of human beings, whose
life is a holiday.

And this people, to whom these horrors are familiar, are those who fill
the world with clamor, concerning the injustice and cruelty of slavery.
I speak in no invidious spirit. Neither the laws nor the government of
England are to be reproached with the evils which are inseparable from
the state of their society--as little, undoubtedly, are we to be
reproached with the existence of our slavery. Including the whole of the
United States--and for reasons already given, the whole ought to be
included, as receiving in no unequal degree the benefit--may we not say
justly that we have less slavery, and more mitigated slavery, than any
other country in the civilized world?

That they are called free, undoubtedly aggravates the sufferings of the
slaves of other regions. They see the enormous inequality which exists,
and feel their o