son was starting the _Liberator_,--and slavery came home to him
with new force. The plantation on which he lived was one of the best in
the West Indies. The proprietor had taken a pride in the character and
condition of his slaves. But he had fallen into bankruptcy, his estate
had been sold, and the new proprietor left it in charge of an overseer
who was a passionate and licentious man, under whom the slaves suffered
a very different treatment. Most pathetic incidents came under Dr.
Channing's notice. But from all he saw about him he concluded that the
physical sufferings of the slaves had been exaggerated by report; that,
with occasional cruelties, they were better off as to physical comfort
than most of the European peasantry. He writes to an English
correspondent, "I suspect that a gang of negroes receive fewer stripes
than a company of soldiers of the same number in your army"; that they
are under a less iron discipline and suffer incomparably less than
soldiers in a campaign. But he adds, and always insists, that their
condition degrades them intellectually and morally, lowers them toward
the brutes, and in this respect the misery of slavery cannot be
expressed too strongly. Marriage is almost unknown; family life, with
its mutual dependence and the resulting tenderness, scarcely exists; and
thus "the poor negro is excluded from Nature's primary school for the
affections and the whole character." "The like causes are fatal to
energy, foresight, self-control."

The inspiration of Channing's creed, the soul of the new movement in
religion, was the potential nobility of human nature--a nobility to be
made real by utmost effort of the individual, and by all wisest
appliances of society. It was from this standpoint that he judged
slavery, and in this spirit that while still in Santa Cruz he began to
write his treatise upon it.

Returning to Boston, he spoke with clearness and weight to his
congregation: "I think no power of conception can do justice to the
evils of slavery. They are chiefly moral, they act on the mind, and
through the mind bring intense suffering to the body. As far as the
human soul can be destroyed, slavery is that destroyer." Having borne
his testimony, he devoted himself to the general work of his ministry.
The violence of the men who had come to the front in Abolitionism was
not only against his taste and feeling, but against his deep
convictions; as he had written years before to Webster, he saw