and the other at $800; which sums are to be
re-imbursed to their respective owners out of the state treasury." In
all probability these poor boys, who are to be hung for stealing,
never dreamed that death was the legal penalty of the crime.

Here is another, from the "New Orleans Bee" of ---- 14, 1837--"The
slave who STRUCK some citizens in Canal street, some weeks since, has
been tried and found guilty, and is sentenced to be HUNG on the 24th."]

Stroud, in his Sketch of the Laws of Slavery, page 100, thus comments
on this monstrous barbarity.

"The hardened convict moves their sympathy, and is to be taught the
laws before he is expected to obey them;[36] yet the guiltless slave
is subjected to an extensive system of cruel enactments, of no part of
which, probably, has he ever heard."

[Footnote 36: "It shall be the duty of the keeper [of the penitentiary]
on the receipt of each prisoner, to _read_ to him or her such parts of
the penal laws of this state as impose penalties for escape, and to
make all the prisoners in the penitentiary acquainted with the same.
It shall also be his duty, on the discharge of such prisoner, to read
to him or her such parts of the laws as impose additional punishments
for the repetition of offences."--_Rule 12th_, for the internal
government of the Penitentiary of Georgia. Sec. 26 of the Penitentiary
Act of 1816.--Prince's Digest, 386.]

Having already drawn so largely on the reader's patience, in
illustrating southern 'public opinion' by the slave laws, instead of
additional illustrations of the same point from another class of those
laws, as was our design, we will group together a few particulars,
which the reader can take in at a glance, showing that the "public
opinion" of slaveholders towards their slaves, which exists at the
south, in the form of law, tramples on all those fundamental
principles of right, justice, and equity, which are recognized as
sacred by all civilized nations, and receive the homage even of
barbarians.

1. One of these principles is, that the _benefits_ of law to the
subject should overbalance its burdens--its protection more than
compensate for its restraints and exactions--and its blessings
altogether outweigh its inconveniences and evils--the former being
numerous, positive, and permanent, the latter few, negative, and
incidental. Totally the reverse of all this is true in the case of the
slave. Law is to him all exaction and no protection: instea