Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/286

fathers or grandfathers of almost all my neighbors were poor men also. It is a common saying that a plantation seldom remains in the same family beyond the third generation. It is out of this class of the poor that the new proprietors spring up; and it is into this class of the poor that the families of the former proprietors subside. But consider how this class of the poor is sunk, deteriorated, and weighed down by slavery! No wonder that in wealth, industry, intelligence, every thing that makes a community respectable, we are so far behind the free states. Not only have our poor free people vastly less chance to rise than the people of the same class at the north, but by holding the bulk of our laborers in perpetual slavery, we cut off the very main source whence fresh energy and strength ought to flow in upon us. Here, in my opinion, is the great evil which this system inflicts upon the community, as well as the greatest wrong which it inflicts on the individuals. It is very easy to say, that compare my slaves with as many families of poor white people within a range of ten miles about, and they are better fed, better clothed, better lodged, and vastly freer from care and anxiety. That is true; but there goes a man, now — Ah, Peter, how'dy, my good fellow?" — such were the words with which Mr Mason nodded to an immense brawny black man, who passed us just at this moment, driving a cart, — "there goes a man, now, who, if he was his own master, and in a country where his color did not deprive him of equal rights, -would, before he died, have a plantation of his own, and one worth owning, too. That fellow has a head; his opinion upon any question of cultivation, or upon any application of plantation labor, is worth more, any day, than mine and that of my two overseers put together. And do you suppose that slavery under any form can agree with such a man as that? There is a considerable class who seem to be born to be the mere instruments of others; and if only such persons were born slaves, it might not be of so much