n this manner, in Alabama, Mississippi,
Missouri, and Arkansas.]

Certain it is, that the time when southern slavery derived countenance
at the North, from its supposed connection with "chivalry," is rapidly
passing away. "Southern Chivalry" will soon be regarded as one of the
by-gone fooleries of a less intelligent and less virtuous age. It will
soon be cast out--giving place to the more reasonable idea, that the
denial of wages to the laborer, the selling of men and women, the
whipping of husbands and wives in each others presence, to compel them
to unrequited toil, the deliberate attempt to extinguish mind, and,
consequently, to destroy the soul--is among the highest offences against
God and man--unspeakably mean and ungentlemanly.

The impression made on the minds of the people as to this matter, is one
of the events of the last two or three years that does not contribute to
lessen the hopes or expectations of abolitionists.

4. The ascendency that Slavery has acquired, and exercises, in the
administration of the government, and the apprehension now prevailing
among the sober and intelligent, irrespective of party, that it will
soon overmaster the Constitution itself, may be ranked among the events
of the last two or three years that affect the course of abolitionists.
The abolitionists regard the Constitution with unabated affection. They
hold in no common veneration the memory of those who made it. They would
be the last to brand Franklin and King and Morris and Wilson and Sherman
and Hamilton with the ineffaceable infamy of attempting to ingraft on
the Constitution, and therefore to _perpetuate_, a system of oppression
in absolute antagonism to its high and professed objects, one which
their own practice condemned,--and this, too, when they had scarcely
wiped away the dust and sweat of the Revolution from their brows! Whilst
abolitionists feel and speak thus of our Constitutional fathers, they do
not justify the dereliction of principle into which they were betrayed,
when they imparted to the work of their hands _any_ power to contribute
to the continuance of such a system. They can only palliate it, by
supposing, that they thought, slavery was already a waning institution,
destined soon to pass away. In their time, (1787) slaves were
comparatively of little value--there being then no great slave-labor
staple (as cotton is now) to make them profitable to their holders.[A]
Had the circumstances of the country re