d America;--and in either England or the Northern States of
America, the prudential and practical views of life prevail so far, that
instances of men sacrificing their money interests at the instigation of
rage, revenge, and hatred, will certainly not abound. But the Southern
slaveholders are a very different race of men from either Manchester
manufacturers or Massachusetts merchants; they are a remnant of barbarism
and feudalism, maintaining itself with infinite difficulty and danger by
the side of the latest and most powerful developement of commercial
civilisation.

The inhabitants of Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New
Orleans, whose estates lie like the suburban retreats of our city magnates
in the near neighbourhood of their respective cities, are not now the
people I refer to. They are softened and enlightened by many
influences,--the action of city life itself, where human sympathy, and
human respect, stimulated by neighbourhood, produce salutary social
restraint, as well as less salutary social cowardice. They travel to the
Northern States, and to Europe; and Europe and the Northern States travel
to them; and in spite of themselves, their peculiar conditions receive
modifications from foreign intercourse. The influence, too, of commercial
enterprise, which, in these latter days, is becoming the agent of
civilisation all over the earth, affects even the uncommercial residents
of the Southern cities, and however cordially they may dislike or despise
the mercantile tendencies of Atlantic Americans, or transatlantic
Englishmen, their frequent contact with them breaks down some of the
barriers of difference between them, and humanises the slaveholder of the
great cities into some relation with the spirit of his own times and
country. But these men are but a most inconsiderable portion of the
slaveholding population of the South,--a nation, for as such they should
be spoken of, of men whose organisation and temperament is that of the
southern European; living under the influence of a climate at once
enervating and exciting; scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid
sand and pestilential swamp; entrenched 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