ill have their own opinions as to the expediency of
maintaining it. The bigots of the South may rave of the beauty of 'the
institution,' and make many believe that they speak for the whole,--a
little scum when whipped covers the whole pail,--but beneath all lies a
steadily-increasing mass of practical men who would readily enough
manifest their opposition should opportunity favor free speech. Such
people, for instance, are not insensible to the enormously corrupting
influence of negroes on their children. Let the reader recall Olmsted's
experiences,--that, for example, where he speaks of three negro women
who had charge of half a dozen white girls of good family, 'from three
to fifteen years of age.'

Their language was loud and obscene, such as I never heard
before from any but the most depraved and beastly women of the
streets. Upon observing me they dropped their voices, but not
with any appearance of shame, and continued their altercation
until their mistresses entered. The white children, in the mean
time, had listened without any appearance of wonder or
annoyance. The moment the ladies opened the door, they became
silent.--_Cotton Kingdom_, vol. i. p. 222.

The Southern _Cultivator_ for June, 1855, speaks of many young men and
women who have 'made shipwreck of all their earthly hopes, and been led
to the fatal step by the seeds of corruption which in the days of
childhood and youth were sown in their hearts by the indelicate and
lascivious manners and conversation of their fathers' negroes.' If we
had no other fact or cause to cite, this almost unnamable one might
convince the reader that there must be a groundwork somewhere in the
South among good, moral, and decent people, for antipathy to
slavery,--human nature teaches us as much. And such people exist, not
only among the hardy inhabitants of the inland districts, who are not
enervated by wealth and 'exclusiveness,' but in planterdom itself.

There are few in the North who realize the number of persons in the
South who silently disapprove of slavery on sound grounds, such as I
have mentioned. Does it seem credible that nearly _ten millions_ of
people should socially sympathize with some three hundred thousand
slave-holders, who act with intolerable arrogance to all
non-slave-holders? 'Even in those regions where slavery is profitable,'
as a writer in the Boston _Transcript_ well expresses it, 'the poor
whites feel the slaveocr