f a new system of slavery. The
primitive and patriarchal, which may also be called the sacred and
natural system, in which the laborer is under the personal control of a
fellow-being endowed with the sentiments and sympathies of humanity,
exists among us. It has been almost everywhere else superseded by the
modern _artificial money power system_, in which man--his thews and
sinews, his hopes and affections, his very being, are all subjected to
the dominion of _capital_--a monster without a heart--cold, stern,
arithmetical--sticking to the bond--taking ever "the pound of
flesh"--working up human life with engines, and retailing it out by
weight and measure. His name of old was "Mammon, the least erected
spirit that fell from heaven." And it is to extend his empire that you
and your deluded coadjutors dedicate your lives. You are stirring up
mankind to overthrow our heaven-ordained system of servitude, surrounded
by innumerable checks, designed and planted deep in the human heart by
God and nature, to substitute the absolute rule of this "spirit
reprobate," whose proper place was hell.

You charge us with looking on our slaves "as chattels or brutes," and
enter into a somewhat elaborate argument to prove that they have "human
forms," "talk," and even "think." Now the fact is, that however you may
indulge in this strain for effect, it is the abolitionists, and not the
slaveholders, who, practically, and in the most important point of view,
regard our slaves as "chattels or brutes." In your calculations of the
consequences of emancipation, you pass over entirely those which must
prove most serious, and which arise from the fact of their being
_persons_.

You appear to think that we might abstain from the use of them as
readily as if they were machines to be laid aside, or cattle that might
be turned out to find pasturage for themselves. I have heretofore
glanced at some of the results that would follow from breaking the bonds
of so many _human beings_, now peacefully and happily linked into our
social system. The tragic horrors, the decay and ruin that would for
years, perhaps for ages, brood over our land, if it could be
accomplished, I will not attempt to portray. But do you fancy the blight
would, in such an event, come to us alone? The diminution of the sugar
crop of the West Indies affected Great Britain only, and there chiefly
the poor. It was a matter of no moment to capital, that labor should
have one comfort less