benumbing your
adversary at the start by an outright electric shock of untruth? But a
man must be supported by a powerful sense of sincerity to be capable of
a statement so royally false that the truth itself shall look tame and
rustic beside it.

You have spoken ill of a certain sort of German metaphysic; but I
perceive that you have now become a convert to it. The final _arcanum_
of that, I think, is, Something = Nothing. You give this abstraction a
concrete form; your axiom is, No Hire = Hire for Life. To deny that
laborers have any property in their own toil, and to allow them their
poor peck of maize and pound of bacon per week, not at all as a wage for
their work, but solely as a means of converting corn into cotton, and
cotton into seats in Congress and summers at Saratoga,--that, according
to the Chelsea metaphysic, is "hiring them for life"! To deny laborers
any legal _status_ as persons, and any social _status_ as human
souls,--to give them fodder for food, and pens for homes,--to withhold
from them the school, the table, and the sanctities of marriage,--if
that is not "hiring them for life," what is it? To affirm, by
consistent practice, that no spiritual, no human value appertains to the
life of laboring men and women,--to rate them in their very persons as
commercial values, measuring the virtue of their existence with coin, as
cloths are measured with a yardstick,--this, we all see, is "hiring them
for life"! To take from women the LEGAL RIGHT to be chaste,--to make it
a _capital offence_ for a woman of the laboring caste to defend her own
person by blows, for any "husband" or father of the laboring caste to
defend wife or daughter with blows, against the lust of another caste,
and, having made them thus helpless before outrage, to close the
judicial tribunals against their testimony, and refuse them the faintest
show of redress,--truly, it is very kind of you to let us know that this
is the simplest piece of "hiring for life," for without that charitable
assistance the fact would surely have eluded our discovery. How could we
have found it out without your assistance, when, after that aid has been
rendered, the fact continues to seem so utterly otherwise as to reflect
even upon your generous information the colors of an unexampled untruth?

No-Hire + Dehumanization of the Laborer = Life-Hire? We never should
have dreamt of it!

Within the past year, a document has come into my hands which they may
tha