esponsible for the division and violence, would
be but to carry out the absurdity, of which the public are guilty, in
holding abolitionists responsible for the mobs, which are got up against
them. These mobs, by the way, are called "abolition mobs." A similar
misnomer would pronounce the mob, that should tear down your house and
shoot your wife, "Henry Clay's mob." Harriet Martineau, in stating the
fact, that the mobs of 1834, in the city of New York, were set down to
the wrong account, says, that the abolitionists were told, that "they
had no business to scare the city with the sight of their burning
property and demolished churches!"

No doubt the light of truth, which the abolitionists are pouring into
the dark den of slavery, greatly excites the monster's wrath: and it may
be, that he vents a measure of it on the helpless and innocent victims
within his grasp. Be it so;--it is nevertheless, not the Ithuriel spear
of truth, that is to be held guilty of the harm:--it is the monster's
own depravity, which cannot

"endure
Touch of celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness."[A]

[Footnote A: This is a reference to a passage in Milton's Paradise Lost,
in which Satan in disguise is touched by the spear of the archangel
Ithuriel and is thereby forced to return to his own form.]

I am, however, far from believing, that the treatment of the slaves is
rendered any more rigorous and cruel by the agitation of the subject of
slavery. I am very far from believing, that it is any harsher now than
it was before the organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Fugitive slaves tell us, it is not: and, inasmuch as the slaveholders
are, and, by both words and actions, abundantly show, that they feel
that they are, arraigned by the abolitionists before the bar of the
civilized world, to answer to the charges of perpetrating cruelties on
their slaves, it would, unless indeed, they are of the number of those
"whose glory is in their shame," be most unphilosophical to conclude,
that they are multiplying proofs of the truth of those charges, more
rapidly than at any former stage of their barbarities. That slaveholders
are not insensible to public opinion and to the value of a good
character was strikingly exhibited by Mr. Calhoun, in his place in the
Senate of the United States, when he followed his frank disclaimer of
all suspicion, that the abolitionists are meditating a war agai