Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/348

320 T. W. Davenport. and in various ways tends to diminish the fraternal sympathy which is the key note or cohesive principle that makes man- kind communal beings. Hence we may assume that moral actions and principles are those which are promotive of a harmonious and progressive social state and that immoral actions and principles are those which produce an opposite result. In other words, that morality means progression and immorality means retrogression ; that what is moral is expedi- ent and what is immoral is inexpedient. Depend upon it, slavery in Oregon will be no different from slavery in Ken- tucky and Tennessee. The same means will have to be adopted here as there. Let no one deceive himself as to that matter. The bloodhounds will be here to track the fugitive from ser- vice, and their discordant music will be heard in the mountain nooks and canyons surrounding our serenely beautiful valleys. So will the auction block, the cat-o-nine-tails, the branding iron, the manacles, the slavedriver and his traffic, which heeds no human tie, fraternal, paternal, filial or marital, as applica- ble to the slave. And as respects the part the non-slaveholder must bear in this scheme, there will be the night patrol for every night in the year, and the taxation to support it. There will be the absence of free schools, the suppression of knowledge and of free speech, a censored press, annoying surveillance, and a subservience to autocratic control, all of which will be progressively bad as time rolls on. Nothing is more true and evident than that a false principle in society is an evolver of evils which continually multiply and im- poverish the social state. Slavery in every Southern State is more cruel and exacting to the slave, more onerous and re^ pressive to the "poor white trash," than in colonial times. Then, with some show of truth, it might have been called a kindly and patriarchal institution and Uncle Tom's Cabin Avould have been sadly out of place. Even now it may be somewhat of an exaggeration, but the growth of greed and the progressive propaganda of slavery will soon leave it in the rear. Our pro-slavery friends are so accustomed to asso- ciating the terms "free niggers" and "nigger equality" with