eer, the verdict of the observer was
apt to be "not so bad as I expected."

On the other hand, many of us know Longfellow's grim poem of the Hunted
Negro. It is a true picture of the life led in the Dismal Swamps of
Virginia by numbers of skulking fugitives, till the industry of
negro-hunting, conducted with hounds of considerable value, ultimately
made their lairs untenable. The scenes in the auction room where,
perhaps on the death or failure of their owner, husbands and wives,
parents and children, were constantly being severed, and negresses were
habitually puffed as brood mares; the gentleman who had lately sold his
half-brother, to be sent far south, because he was impudent; the devilish
cruelty with which almost the only recorded slave insurrection was
stamped out; the chase and capture and return in fetters of slaves who
had escaped north, or, it might be, of free negroes in their place; the
advertisements for such runaways, which Dickens collected, and which
described each by his scars or mutilations; the systematic slave
breeding, for the supply of the cotton States, which had become a staple
industry of the once glorious Virginia; the demand arising for the
restoration of the African slave trade--all these were realities. The
Southern people, in the phrase of President Wilson, "knew that their
lives were honourable, their relations with their slaves humane, their
responsibility for the existence of slavery amongst them remote"; they
burned with indignation when the whole South was held responsible for the
occasional abuses of slavery. But the harsh philanthropist, who
denounced them indiscriminately, merely dwelt on those aspects of slavery
which came to his knowledge or which he actually saw on the border line.
And the occasional abuses, however occasional, were made by the
deliberate choice of Southern statesmanship an essential part of the
institution. Honourable and humane men in the South scorned exceedingly
the slave hunter and the slave dealer. A candid slave owner, discussing
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," found one detail flagrantly unfair; the ruined
master would have had to sell his slaves to the brute, Legree, but for
the world he would not have shaken hands with him. "Your children,"
exclaimed Lincoln, "may play with the little black children, but they
must not play with his"--the slave dealer's, or the slave driver's, or
the slave hunter's. By that fact alone, as he bitingly but unanswerably
insis