ation, sensuality, brutality,
cruelty, and meanness, engendered by the habit of making men and women
work without pay, and flogging them if they demur at it, constitutes a
congenial soil out of which cock-fighting and horse-racing are the
spontaneous growth.

Again,--The kind treatment of the slaves is often argued from the
liberal education and enlarged views of slaveholders. The facts and
reasonings of the preceding pages have shown, that 'liberal
education,' despotic habits and ungoverned passions work together with
slight friction. And every day's observation shows that the former is
often a stimulant to the latter.

But the notion so common at the north that the majority of the
slaveholders are persons of education, is entirely erroneous. A _very
few_ slaveholders in each of the slave states have been men of _ripe_
education, to whom our national literature is much indebted. A larger
number may be called _well_ educated--these reside mostly in the
cities and large villages, but a majority of the slaveholders are
ignorant men, thousands of them notoriously so, _mere boors_ unable to
write their names or to read the alphabet.

No one of the slave states has probably so much general education as
Virginia. It is the oldest of them--has furnished one half of the
presidents of the United States--has expended more upon her university
than any state in the Union has done during the same time upon its
colleges--sent to Europe nearly twenty years since for her most
learned professors, and in fine, has far surpassed every other slave
state in her efforts to disseminate education among her citizens, and
yet, the Governor of Virginia in his message to the legislature (Jan.
7, 1839) says, that of four thousand six hundred and fourteen adult
males in that state, who applied to the county clerks for marriage
licenses in the year 1837, 'ONE THOUSAND AND FORTY SEVEN _were unable
to write their names_.' The governor adds, 'These statements, it will
be remembered, are confined to one sex: the education of females it is
to be feared, is in a condition of _much greater neglect_.'

The Editor of the Virginia Times, published at Wheeling, in his paper
of Jan. 23, 1839, says,--

"We have every reason to suppose that one-fourth of the people of the
state cannot write their names, and they have not, of course, any
other species of education."

Kentucky is the child of Virginia; her first settlers were some of the
most distinguished c