can do it,--therefore I may steal all
he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy.
Whatever is too hard, too dirty, too disagreeable, for me, I may set
Quashy to doing. Because I don't like work, Quashy shall work. Because
the sun burns me, Quashy shall stay in the sun. Quashy shall earn the
money, and I will spend it. Quashy shall lie down in every puddle, that
I may walk over dry-shod. Quashy shall do my will, and not his, all the
days of his mortal life, and have such chance of getting to heaven, at
last, as I find convenient. This I take to be about what slavery is."

St. Clare goes on to say that "for pity's sake, for shame's sake,
because we are men born of women and not savage beasts, many of us do
not and dare not--we would scorn to--use the full power which our savage
laws put into our hands." In truth, a compilation of the slave laws was
one of the most convincing arguments against the whole system.

This book is characterized by Charles G. Ames,--whose long life of noble
service to humanity included earnest work among the anti-slavery
pioneers: "To my mind, the heaviest blow, though probably not the most
telling one, ever struck against our slave system as a system was the
compilation and publication of Stroud's _Slave Laws_--a codification
from the statute-books of the Southern States of their own barbarous
methods of legislation, made necessary for the protection of the
peculiar institution. All the recent sentimental defenses of it, as
gentle, humane, and patriarchal, seem utterly to ignore the rugged
facts, which Lawyer Stroud's book made as plain as the stratification of
the rocks to the eye of the geologist."

In its actual administration, the system was in a measure softened and
humanized. It was more humane in the border than in the cotton and sugar
States, and it was generally better when a plantation was managed by its
owner than when left to an overseer,--as the plantation of Fanny
Kemble's husband had been left. But in one respect its disastrous effect
was everywhere felt. By associating manual labor with the stigma of
servitude, it bred, in free men, a strong disrelish for work,--a most
demoralizing and ruinous influence. Inefficiency and degradation were
the marks of the non-slaveholding whites. The master class missed the
wholesome regimen of toil. Nature is never more beneficent than when
she lays on man the imperative command "Thou shalt work." Of all ways of
evadi