ll their own free children
into slavery; and, as there are good-for-nothing white as well as
coloured persons everywhere, no one, perhaps, will wonder at such
inhuman transactions: particularly in the Southern States of America,
where I believe there is a greater want of humanity and high principle
amongst the whites, than among any other civilized people in the world.

I know that those who are not familiar with the working of "the
peculiar institution," can scarcely imagine any one so totally devoid
of all natural affection as to sell his own offspring into returnless
bondage. But Shakespeare, that great observer of human nature, says:--

"With caution judge of probabilities.
Things deemed unlikely, e'en impossible,
Experience often shews us to be true."

My wife's new mistress was decidedly more humane than the majority of
her class. My wife has always given her credit for not exposing her to
many of the worst features of slavery. For instance, it is a common
practice in the slave States for ladies, when angry with their maids,
to send them to the calybuce sugar-house, or to some other place
established for the purpose of punishing slaves, and have them severely
flogged; and I am sorry it is a fact, that the villains to whom those
defenceless creatures are sent, not only flog them as they are ordered,
but frequently compel them to submit to the greatest indignity. Oh! if
there is any one thing under the wide canopy of heaven, horrible enough
to stir a man's soul, and to make his very blood boil, it is the
thought of his dear wife, his unprotected sister, or his young and
virtuous daughters, struggling to save themselves from falling a prey
to such demons!

It always appears strange to me that any one who was not born a
slaveholder, and steeped to the very core in the demoralizing
atmosphere of the Southern States, can in any way palliate slavery. It
is still more surprising to see virtuous ladies looking with patience
upon, and remaining indifferent to, the existence of a system that
exposes nearly two millions of their own sex in the manner I have
mentioned, and that too in a professedly free and Christian country.
There is, however, great consolation in knowing that God is just, and
will not let the oppressor of the weak, and the spoiler of the
virtuous, escape unpunished here and hereafter.

I believe a similar retribution to that which destroyed Sodom is
hanging over the slaveholders. My since