amiable and useful qualities, or the performance of meritorious actions.

Now so far as regards the unprivileged class of the community, it is obvious at a single glance, that the constitutions of the Southern States fail totally, in securing any one of the above objects. They not only fail, but they do worse; they make a deliberate sacrifice of them all.

This sacrifice is said to be necessary in order to secure the well being of the privileged class. If in fact it is so, it must needs be confessed that the alternative is very unfortunate. The Southern people, if we allow this necessity, are in the unhappy predicament of a savage tribe of which one half, in order to sustain existence, are driven to kill and to devour the other half. Before we can admit the necessity of any such horrible experiment, every other means must first have been tried, and must have failed. What should we think of a tribe of savages who lived fat and comfortable upon the blood and flesh of their brethren, without the slightest attempt to devise any other means of subsistence; and who repulsed with impatient anger and bitter reproaches, the benevolent efforts of those who would point out to them a more decent and innocent way?

It is clear that so far as the unprivileged class are concerned, the political results of slavery are most disastrous. Slaves suffer at one and the same time, all the worst evils of tyranny and of anarchy. The laws so far as they are concerned, are all penal; they impose a multitude of obligations, but they create no rights. The compendious definition of a slave is, a man, who has no rights, but with respect to whom the rights of his owner are unlimited. If the law in some respects, seems to protect him, it is not in his character of a man, but in his character of a thing, a piece of property. Exactly the same protection which the law extends to a slave, it extends to a dog, a horse, or a writing desk. The master does as he pleases with either. If any other person undertakes to dam

age, steal, or destroy them, he is answerable to the owner, and is punished not as a violator of personal rights, but for having disregarded the laws of property.

The constant sacrifice of so many human victims, amounting in several states of the American Union to a majority of the population, such a sweeping deprivation of rights as the slave-holding states exhibit, if it can be justified at all, must find that justification in some vast amount of good, which that sacrifice produces. This good must be principally sought for among the privileged class. If it exist at all it must be either political, by increasing the security, freedom and equality of the privileged class; economical, -by increasing wealth, comfort and civilization; or personal,-by its beneficial influences on individual character. When Mr. McDuffie pronounces slavery the best and only sure foundation of a free government, if he has any meaning at all, if this declaration. be any thing more than a passionate paradox,-he must mean to imply, that the political consequences of slavery are of a kind highly beneficial to the master; in fact so beneficial to the master as to form a counterpoise, and more than a counterpoise to all the evils it inflicts upon the slave. It becomes then an important question, what are the effects which slavery produces upon the political, economical, and personal condition of the privileged class? And in the first place of its political results.

8

SECTION II.

Slavery, as it affects the security of the privileged class.

1. We will consider in the first place how the security of property is affected by the institution of slavery.

Property is better secured in proportion as a greater part of the population is made to feel a direct interest in its security. The moral force of opinion in this as in other cases, has an efficacy greater than law. Laws unsustained by public opinion can only be enforced by a great and constant exertion of physical power.

1. With regard to the slave holding states, a large part of the population, to wit, the slaves, so far from having any personal interest in upholding the laws of property, have a direct and powerful interest the other way. The laws of property in their eyes, so far from being designed to promote the public good, and to confer a benefit upon all, are but a cunningly devised system by means of which the character and the name of Right is bestowed upon the rankest injustice, and the most flagrant usurpation. This attempt to monopolize the benefits of property, this system by which a large portion of the community are not only deprived of those benefits but are actually themselves converted into articles of property, has the necessary effect to create in the very bosom of the community, a state of feeling utterly hostile to security. Slaves are universally depredators upon the property of their masters. Such depredation they regard as perfectly justifiable and even praiseworthy. It requires the most incessant vigilance to guard against it, nor will the most incessant vigilance always suffice. The security of the slave-master is the security of a housekeeper who knows that he entertains a gang of thieves upon his premises, and who is in constant apprehension of being robbed.

Nor is this systematic spirit of plunder confined to

the unprivileged class. It embraces also the large class of free traders who gain their livelihood by a traffic in stolen goods. It is these persons who offer inducement for a large part of the depredations which the slaves commit upon their masters. These depredations, though small in the individual instances, are enormous in the total amount. The extreme severity with which the laws of the southern states visit the offence of trading with slaves in articles suspected to be stolen, and the terrible outrages occasionally committed upon this sort of offenders by planters who think the inflictions of the law to be too mild, or too uncertain, are a sufficient proof in how serious a light these depredations are regarded.

2. By the institution of slavery, the slaves themselves become the chief article of property. Property of all kinds has a certain tendency to take wings to itself and fly away. This is peculiarly the case with slave property. In addition to all the other accidents to which slaves, in common with other species of property, are exposed, they have a propensity to impoverish their masters by absconding. How frequentÎy this propensity comes into exercise, any body may learn by examining the columns of the southern newspapers. Of the slaves that run away, the greater part are recovered: this is true, but still the master is a loser. He loses their services during their absence,often at the most critical moment of the crop,-besides the expense of their apprehension and conveyance home, including the reward offered, which in itself is often equal to half the money value of the slave.

3. Many slaves submit with great reluctance to the station and duties which the law assigns to them. To keep these unquiet creatures in due subordination, it becomes necessary to wound, to maim, and sometimes to kill them. This chance of loss takes away in a certain degree, from the security of this kind of property.

4. We come now to a cause of insecurity of a more serious character than any yet enumerated. Property

in slaves is not a kind of property generally acknowledged. There are whole nations who deny that any such kind of property ought to exist. All the most enlightened people in the world are precisely of that opinion. Within the last fifty years, an effort has been begun, an effort which every day gathers new force and earnestness,-for the total abolition of this kind of property. The alarm which this effort produces among the holders of slaves is natural, and it is great. An alarm exists at all times among slaveholders, because there is always a certain apprehension lest the slaves themselves may reclaim their liberty by force. But that alarm reaches an extreme height when it is known that there are other persons, over whom the slave-masters have no control, who sympathize with the slaves, and who profess the intention of using every moral means to bring about their emancipation. Moral means is a phrase which slavemasters find it difficult to understand. Force, violence, is the only means with which they are familiar; and this means which they themselves so constantly employ, they naturally apprehend, will be used against them. The degree of alarm thus produced, is sufficiently indicated by the ferocity with which the persons called abolitionists have been assailed by the slave-holders, and by the savage barbarities exercised upon such abolitionists, or supposed abolitionists, as have fallen into their hands; exercised generally upon mere suspicion, and with hardly any evidence that the sufferers were guilty of entertaining the opinions ascribed to them.

Thus it appears that under a constitution authorizing slavery, one of the chief items of property, namely, slave property, from its very nature, its total want of any foundation of mutual benefit, is peculiarly insecure; and this insecurity spreads to every other kind of property, because the institution of slavery, by its necessary effect destroys all respect for property of any kind, in a large part of the population, and also creates a vast number of depredators.