ejected at any time; if they are discouraged from the minor industries
essential to comfort, lest these should interfere with the grosser labor
required of them; if they are kept idle out of crop time for fear they
should not be available in crop time; if their mental improvement is
discouraged by the planter instinct, unchanged in nature though
circumscribed in scope; if on many estates they are herded in barracks
whose promiscuous life debases still lower their already low morality;
if their labors are directed for absentee masters by hired overseers,
whose interest is not to create a wholesome confidence between laborers
and proprietors, but to get the most they can out of them during their
own term of employment; if they are treated with the old slaveholding
arrogance, embittered by the consciousness of a check; and if thereby
the more self-respecting are driven off, and the more abject-spirited
who remain are rendered still more abject: I submit it is not fair to
argue from this class of semi-slaves to the character of those who are
really free, who call no man master, who have a chance to be men if they
will, unhampered except by the general depressing influences that will
always work in a country where slavery has lately existed, and where the
slaveholding class have still a predominant social and political
influence. And it is to be noted that Carlyle's picture is drawn from
the neighborhood of a plantation, and so are Trollope's. Mr. Trollope,
it is true, takes all imaginable pains to write himself down an ass. By
his own ostentatious confessions, the only intellectual
comprehensiveness to which he can lay claim is an astonishingly
comprehensive ignorance. In view of this, his sage discoursings upon
grave questions of political and social economy have about as comical an
effect as the moralizings of a harlequin. But he is a lively describer
of what passes under his eyes, and his sketches of what he heard and saw
among the planters and on the plantations are doubtless authentic.
However, he did not visit the small settlers; and to take pains to
inform himself of the condition of a class of the population which he
was not among, except by catching up the dinner-table maledictions of
his planting friends against the class which they hate most, as being
least dependent on them, would be of course entirely contrary to his
professed superficiality.

There are but two recent works of much value on emancipation in
Jama