that he may spell out the words of the law, and thus avoid its
penalties, the law shakes its terrors at him; while, at the same time,
those who made the laws refuse to make them known to those for whom
they are designed. The memory of Caligula will blacken with execration
while time lasts, because be hung up his laws so high that people
could not read them, and then punished them because they did not keep
them. Our slaveholders aspire to blacker infamy. Caligula was content
with hanging up his laws where his subjects could _see_ them; and if
they could not read them, they knew where they were, and might get at
them, if, in their zeal to learn his will, they had used the same
means to get up to them that those did who hung them there. Even
Caligula, wretch as he was, would have shuddered at cutting their legs
off, to prevent their climbing to them; or, if they had got there, at
boring their eyes out, to prevent their reading them. Our slaveholders
virtually do both; for they prohibit their slaves acquiring that
knowledge of letters which would enable them to read the laws; and if,
by stealth, they get it in spite of them, they prohibit them books and
papers, and flog them if they are caught at them. Further--Caligula
merely hung his laws so high that they could not be _read_--our
slaveholders have hung theirs so high above the slave that they cannot
be _seen_--they are utterly out of sight, and he finds out that they
are there only by the falling of the penalties on his head.[35] Thus
the "public opinion" of slave states protects the defenceless slave by
arming a host of legal penalties and setting them in ambush at every
thicket along his path, to spring upon him unawares.

[Footnote 35: The following extract from the Alexandria (D.C.) Gazette
is all illustration. "CRIMINALS CONDEMNED.--On Monday last the Court
of the borough of Norfolk, Va. sat on the trial of four negro boys
arraigned for burglary. The first indictment charged them with
breaking into the hardware store of Mr. E.P. Tabb, upon which two of
them were found guilty by the Court, and condemned to suffer the
penalty of the law, which, in the case of a slave, is death. The
second Friday in April is appointed for the execution of their awful
sentence. _Their ages do not exceed sixteen_. The first, a fine active
boy, belongs to a widow lady in Alexandria; the latter, a house
servant, is owned by a gentleman in the borough. The value of one was
fixed at $1000,