only, but in the public sentiment, a
sacredness of rights, which no man, except by stealth, can violate
with impunity. There is no other law for the Governor of New-York or
of Massachusetts, than for the beggar in your streets. That which
protects the dwelling and the property of the rich man, belongs just
as much to the hovel of the beggar. God sends but one sun, and it is
the same light that kindles against the roof of a mansion, that dawns
upon the thatch of a hut. The same air comes to each, the same
showers, the same seasons, summer and winter. And as is Nature, so in
the North, is law, and the distributive benefits of society. They
bathe society from top to bottom! The rich, the learned, the refined,
the strong, may know how to make a better use of the air, but they
have no more air of privilege to breathe, than the poorest wretch.

In the South, exactly the reverse is true, not by stealth, not by
neglect of a recognized principle, but as the result of men's ideas,
and by organized arrangements. Touch a hireling's wages, in the North,
and the Law stands to defend him and beat you down! Take the laborer's
wages in the South, and the law stands to defend you, and beat him
down.

Beat a man, in the North, for a private wrong done, and the law will
strike you. But in the South, it is the right of the white,
unquestioned and unquestionable to beat every third person in the
community.

Let the proudest mill-owner break but the skin of the poorest
operative in Lowell or Lawrence, and both law and public sentiment,
alike, would grasp and punish him!

But in the South the law refuses to look at any degree of cruelty in
chastisements upon the universal laborer, short of maiming or death,
and public sentiment is but little better than the law.

The laborer in the North answers to a tribunal; in the South, to a
master, incensed, passionate, vindictive in justice executed upon all
symptoms of resisting manhood!

In the North, nothing is more sacred than a man's family and his
children. It would not be possible for a man to do public violence to
a family circle without vindictive penalty. Let him separate a mother
from her daughters, let him employ a hireling ruffian to carry off the
boys into the country and parcel them out there--let him scatter the
flock, and leave the children motherless, and the parents childless,
and what do you think would become of _him_?

In the South it is a part of the civil rights of men t