ould be subjected to such baneful influences; but the devil
must have his due, and men brought up in habits of peremptory command over
their fellow men, 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 such as this man passed
through, saving by their exercise himself and all committed to his charge.
I know that the southern men are apt to deny the fact that they do live
under an habitual sense of danger; but a slave population, coerced into
obedience, though unarmed and half fed, _is_ a threatening source of
constant insecurity, and every southern _woman_ to whom I have spoken on
the subject, has admitted to me that they live in terror of their slaves.
Happy are such of them as have protectors like J---- C----. Such men will
best avoid and best encounter the perils that may assail them from the
abject subject, human element, in the control of which their noble
faculties are sadly and unworthily employed.

_Wednesday, 17th April._--I rode to-day after breakfast, to Mrs. D----'s,
another of my neighbours, who lives full twelve miles off. During the last
two miles of my expedition, I had the white sand hillocks and blue line of
the Atlantic in view. The house at which I called was a tumble-down
barrack of a dwelling in the woods, with a sort of poverty-stricken
pretentious air about it, like sundry 'proud planters' dwellings that I
have seen. I was received by the sons as well as the lady of the house,
and could not but admire the lordly rather than manly indifference, with
which these young gentlemen, in gay guard chains and fine attire, played
the gallants to me, while filthy, bare-footed half naked negro women
brought in refreshments, and stood all the while fanning the cake, and
sweetmeats, and their young masters, as if they had been all the same sort
of stuff. I felt ashamed for the lads. The conversation turned upon Dr.
H----'s trial; for there has been a trial as a matter of form, and an
acquittal as a matter of course; and the gentlemen said, upon my
expressing some surprise at the latter event, that there could not be
found in all Georgia a jury who would convict him, which says but little
for the moral sense of 'all Georgia.' From this most painful subject we
fell into the Brunswick canal, and thereafter I took my leave and rode
home. I met my babies in the wood-wagon, and took S---- u