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SLAVERY.
Chap. VII.

less, happy set, spending their evenings in dancing or singing to the banja; and 'Oh, carry me back to Old Virginny,' or 'Susannah, don't you cry for me,' may be heard on summer evenings rising from the maize and tobacco grounds of Kentucky. Yet, whether naturally humane instincts may lead to merciful treatment of the slave, or the same result be accomplished by the rigorous censorship of public opinion in the border States, apart from the abstract question of slavery, that system is greatly to be reprobated which gives power without responsibility, and permits the temporal, yes, the eternal well-being of another to depend upon the will and caprice of a man, when the victim of his injustice is deprived of the power of appeal to an earthly tribunal. Instances of severe treatment on one side, and of kindness on the other, cannot fairly be brought as arguments for or against the system; it must be justified or condemned by the undeviating law of moral right as laid down in divine revelation. Slavery existed in 1850 in 15 out of 31 States, the number of slaves being 3,204,345, connected by sympathy and blood with 433,643 coloured persons, nominally free, but who occupy a social position of the lowest grade. It is probable that this number will increase, as it has hitherto done, in a geometrical ratio, which will give 6,000,000, in 1875, of a people dangerous from numbers merely, but doubly, trebly so in their consciousness of oppression, and in the passions which may incite them to a terrible revenge. America boasts of freedom, and of such a progress as the world has never seen before; but while the tide of the Anglo-Saxon race rolls across her continent, and while we contemplate with pleasure a