southern European, living
under the influence of a climate at once enervating and exciting,
scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid sand and pestilential
swamp, intrenched within their own boundaries, surrounded by creatures
absolutely subject to their despotic will; delivered over by hard
necessity to the lowest excitements of drinking, gambling, and
debauchery for sole recreation; independent of all opinion; ignorant of
all progress; isolated from all society--it is impossible to conceive a
more savage existence within the border of any modern civilization." The
picture of the poor whites is graphic and somber, but space must limit
these quotations.

She gives credit for the habits of courage and command, which are bred
in the upper class, as when she tells of a heroic rescue from a
shipwreck: "The devil must have his due, and men brought up in habits of
peremptory command over their fellowmen, and under the constant
apprehension of danger and awful necessity of immediate readiness to
meet it, acquire qualities precious to themselves and others in hours of
supreme peril."

She touches repeatedly on the social restrictions on free speech; thus,
speaking of two gentlemen, one a clergyman: "They seem good and kind and
amiable men, and I have no doubt are conscientious in their capacity of
slave holders; but to one who has lived outside this dreadful
atmosphere, the whole tone of their discourse has a morally muffled
sound which one must hear to be able to conceive." She observes that
whenever she discusses slavery with people she meets, they waive the
abstract right or wrong of the system. Now and then she gets a bit of
entire frankness, as when a very distinguished South Carolinian says to
her, "I'll tell you why abolition is impossible; because every healthy
negro can fetch $1000 in Charleston market at this moment."

She generalizes as to the effects of emancipation in a way which later
events completely justified. Unlike the West Indies, she says, the South
is not tropical, and will not yield food without labor, and necessity
would compel the liberated blacks to work. That they would not work, and
the ground would lie idle, was, as we know, the bogy which was held up
to scare away from emancipation--just as in our own day the danger of
race mixture is made a bogy to scare away from social justice. But the
event proved that Fanny Kemble was right in her predictions, in which
indeed she was at one with other c