n
residence, with but one apartment, where both sexes and all ages herd
promiscuously at night, like the beasts of the field.[F] Add to this,
the ignorance, and degradation;[G] the daily sunderings of kindred, the
revelries of lust, the lacerations and baptisms of blood, sanctioned by
law, and patronized by public sentiment. What was the bondage of Egypt
when compared with this? And yet for her oppression of the poor, God
smote her with plagues, and trampled her as the mire, till she passed
away in his wrath, and the place that knew her in her pride, knew her no
more. Ah! "I have seen the afflictions of my people, and I have heard
their groanings, and am come down to deliver them." HE DID COME, and
Egypt sank a ruinous heap, and her blood closed over her. If such was
God's retribution for the oppression of heathen Egypt, of how much sorer
punishment shall a Christian people be thought worthy, who cloak with
religion a system, in comparison with which the bondage of Egypt
dwindles to nothing? Let those believe who can, that God commissioned
his people to rob others of _all_ their rights, while he denounced
against them wrath to the uttermost, if they practised the _far lighter_
oppression of Egypt--which robbed its victims of only the least and
cheapest of their rights, and left the females unplundered even of
these. What! Is God divided against himself? When He had just turned
Egypt into a funeral pile; while his curse yet blazed upon her unburied
dead, and his bolts still hissed amidst her slaughter, and the smoke of
her torment went upwards because she had "ROBBED THE POOR," did He
license the VICTIMS of robbery to rob the poor of ALL? As _Lawgiver_,
did he _create_ a system tenfold more grinding than that for which he
had just hurled Pharaoh headlong, and overwhelmed his princes and his
hosts, till "hell was moved to meet them at their coming?"

[Footnote C: See law of North Carolina, Haywood's Manual 524-5. To show
that slaveholders are not better than their laws. We give a few
testimonies. Rev. Thomas Clay, of Georgia, (a slaveholder,) in an
address before the Georgia presbytery, in 1834, speaking of the slave's
allowance of food, says:--"The quantity allowed by custom is a _peck of
corn a week._" The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser of May 30,
1788, says, "a _single peck of corn a week, or the like measure of
rice_, is the ordinary quantity of provision for a _hard-working_ slave;
to which a small quantit