not lived on a slave
estate can have. It is very true that in reviving the altogether exploded
fashion of making the hero of her novel 'the perfect monster that the
world ne'er saw,' Mrs. Stowe has laid herself open to fair criticism, and
must expect to meet with it from the very opposite taste of the present
day; but the ideal excellence of her principal character is no argument at
all against the general accuracy of her statements with regard to the
evils of slavery;--everything else in her book is not only possible, but
probable, and not only probable, but a very faithful representation of the
existing facts:--faithful, and not, as you accuse it of being,
exaggerated; for, with the exception of the horrible catastrophe, the
flogging to death of poor Tom, she has pourtrayed none of the most
revolting instances of crime produced by the slave system--with which she
might have darkened her picture, without detracting from its perfect
truth. Even with respect to the incident of Tom's death, it must not be
said that if such an event is possible, it is hardly probable; for this is
unfortunately not true. It is not true that the value of the slave as
property infallibly protects his life from the passions of his master. It
is no new thing for a man's passions to blind him to his most obvious and
immediate temporal interests, as well as to his higher and everlasting
ones,--in various parts of the world and stages of civilisation, various
human passions assume successive prominence, and become developed, to the
partial exclusion or deadening of others. In savage existence, and those
states of civilisation least removed from it, the animal passions
predominate. In highly cultivated modern society, where the complicated
machinery of human existence is at once a perpetually renewed cause and
effect of certain legal and moral restraints, which, in the shape of
government and public opinion, protect the congregated lives and interests
of men from the worst outrages of open violence, the natural selfishness
of mankind assumes a different development; and the love of power, of
pleasure, or of pelf, exhibits different phenomena from those elicited
from a savage under the influence of the same passions. The channel in
which the energy and activity of modern society inclines more and more to
pour itself, is the peaceful one of the pursuit of gain. This is
preeminently the case with the two great commercial nations of the earth,
England an