nd
exposure. Let him blow them up to his heart's content, as Daniel did the
image of Bell and the Dragon.

But our author, in this matter of negro slavery, has undertaken to apply
his explosive pitch and rosin, not to the affectation of humanity, but to
humanity itself. He mocks at pity, scoffs at all who seek to lessen the
amount of pain and suffering, sneers at and denies the most sacred
rights, and mercilessly consigns an entire class of the children of his
Heavenly Father to the doom of compulsory servitude. He vituperates the
poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a
Mississippi slave-driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on
the banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave-pen and
auction-block, vulgar, unmanly, indecent, a scandalous outrage upon good
taste and refined feeling, which at once degrades the author and insults
his readers.

He assumes (for he is one of those sublimated philosophers who reject the
Baconian system of induction and depend upon intuition without recourse
to facts and figures) that the emancipated class in the West India
Islands are universally idle, improvident, and unfit for freedom; that
God created them to be the servants and slaves of their "born lords," the
white men, and designed them to grow sugar, coffee, and spices for their
masters, instead of raising pumpkins and yams for themselves; and that,
if they will not do this, "the beneficent whip" should be again employed
to compel them. He adopts, in speaking of the black class, the lowest
slang of vulgar prejudice. "Black Quashee," sneers the gentlemanly
philosopher,--"black Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the
spices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a little
less ugly than his present one), and with beneficent whip, since other
methods avail not, will be compelled to work."

It is difficult to treat sentiments so atrocious and couched in such
offensive language with anything like respect. Common sense and
unperverted conscience revolt instinctively against them. The doctrine
they inculcate is that which underlies all tyranny and wrong of man
towards man. It is that under which "the creation groaneth and
travaileth unto this day." It is as old as sin; the perpetual argument
of strength against weakness, of power against right; that of the Greek
philosopher, that the barbarians, being of an inferior race, were born to
be slaves to