r will be
forgotten, as you read, in the profound and appalled attention enforced
by this remarkable revelation of the interior life of Slavery. The
spirit, the character, and the purpose of the Rebellion are here laid
bare. Its inevitability is equally apparent. The book is a permanent and
most valuable chapter in our history; for it is the first ample, lucid,
faithful, detailed account, from the actual head-quarters of a
slave-plantation in this country, of the workings of the system,--its
persistent, hopeless, helpless crushing of humanity in the slave, and
the more fearful moral and mental dry-rot it generates in the master.

We have had plenty of literature upon the subject. First of all, in
spirit and comprehension, the masterly, careful, copious, and patient
works of Mr. Olmsted. But he, like Arthur Young in France, was only an
observer. He could be no more. "Uncle Tom," as its "Key" shows, and as
Mrs. Kemble declares, was no less a faithful than the most famous
witness against the system. But it was a novel. Then there was "American
Slavery as it is," a work of authenticated facts, issued by the American
Anti-Slavery Society in 1839, and the fearful mass of testimony
incessantly published by the distinctively Abolition papers,
periodicals, books, and orators, during the last quarter of a century.
But the world was deaf. "They have made it a business. They select all
the horrors. They accumulate exceptions." Such were the objections that
limited the power of this tremendous battery. Meanwhile, also, it was
answered. Foreign tourists were taken to "model plantations." They shed
tears over the patriarchal benignity of this venerable and beautiful
provision of Divine Providence for the spiritual training of our African
fellow-creatures. The affection of "Mammy" for "Massa and Missis" was
something unknown where hired labor prevailed. Graver voices took up the
burden of the song. There was no pauperism in a slave-country. There
were no prostitutes. It had its disadvantages, certainly; but what form
of society, what system of labor has not? Besides, here it was. It was
the interest of slaveholders to be kind. And what a blessing to bring
the poor heathen from benighted Africa and pagan servitude to the
ennobling influences of Slavery, as practised among Southwestern
Christians in America, and "professors" in South Carolina and Georgia!
See the Reverend Mr. Adams and Miss Murray _passim_. This was the
answer made to th