ations.

With regard to the statement respecting the sums of money earned by
industrious negroes, there is no doubt that it is perfectly correct. I
knew of some slaves on a plantation in the extreme South who had received,
at various times, large sums of money from a shopkeeper in the small town
near their estate, for the grey moss or lichen collected from the
evergreen oaks of Carolina and Georgia, upon which it hangs in vast
masses, and after some cleaning process becomes an excellent substitute
for horse-hair, for bed, chair, and sofa-stuffing. On another estate, some
of the slaves were expert boat makers, and had been allowed by their
masters to retain the price (no inconsiderable one) for some that they had
found time to manufacture after their day's labour was accomplished. These
were undoubtedly privileges, but I confess it appears to me that the
juster view of the matter would be this--if these men were industrious
enough out of their scanty leisure to earn these sums of money, which a
mere exercise of arbitrary will on the part of the master allowed them to
keep, how much more of remuneration, of comfort, of improvement, physical
and mental, might they not have achieved, had the due price of their daily
labour merely been paid to them? It seems to me that this is the mode of
putting the case to Englishmen, and all who have not agreed to consider
uncertain favour an equivalent for common justice in the dealings of man
with man. As the slaves are well known to toil for years sometimes to
amass the means of rescuing themselves from bondage, the fact of their
being able and sometimes allowed to earn considerable sums of money is
notorious. But now that I have answered one by one the instances you have
produced, with others--I am sure as accurate and I believe as common--of
an entirely opposite description, permit me to ask you what this sort of
testimony amounts to. I allow you full credit for yours, allow me full
credit for mine, and the result is very simply a nullification of the one
by the other statement, and a proof that there is as much good as evil in
the details of slavery; but now, be pleased to throw into the scale this
consideration, that the principle of the whole is unmitigated abominable
evil, as by your own acknowledgement you hold it to be, and add, moreover,
that the principle being invariably bad beyond the power of the best man
acting under it to alter its execrable injustice, the goodness of the