ion of prostrate but not
conquered Ireland, relates the following anecdote in a speech delivered
by him in the Conciliation Hall, Dublin, before the Loyal National
Repeal Association, March 31, 1845. "No matter," said Mr. O'CONNELL,
"under what specious term it may disguise itself, slavery is still
hideous. _It has a natural, an inevitable tendency to brutalize every
noble faculty of man._ An American sailor, who was cast away on the
shore of Africa, where he was kept in slavery for three years, was, at
the expiration of that period, found to be imbruted and stultified--he
had lost all reasoning power; and having forgotten his native language,
could only utter some savage gibberish between Arabic and English, which
nobody could understand, and which even he himself found difficulty
in pronouncing. So much for the humanizing influence of THE DOMESTIC
INSTITUTION!" Admitting this to have been an extraordinary case of
mental deterioration, it proves at least that the white slave can sink
as low in the scale of humanity as the black one.

Mr. DOUGLASS has very properly chosen to write his own Narrative, in
his own style, and according to the best of his ability, rather than
to employ some one else. It is, therefore, entirely his own production;
and, considering how long and dark was the career he had to run as a
slave,--how few have been his opportunities to improve his mind since he
broke his iron fetters,--it is, in my judgment, highly creditable to his
head and heart. He who can peruse it without a tearful eye, a heaving
breast, an afflicted spirit,--without being filled with an unutterable
abhorrence of slavery and all its abettors, and animated with a
determination to seek the immediate overthrow of that execrable
system,--without trembling for the fate of this country in the hands of
a righteous God, who is ever on the side of the oppressed, and whose arm
is not shortened that it cannot save,--must have a flinty heart, and be
qualified to act the part of a trafficker "in slaves and the souls of
men." I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements;
that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing
drawn from the imagination; that it comes short of the reality, rather
than overstates a single fact in regard to SLAVERY AS IT IS. The
experience of FREDERICK DOUGLASS, as a slave, was not a peculiar one;
his lot was not especially a hard one; his case may be regarded as a
very fair spe