nk their stars who are not required to see. It is the private diary
of a most eminent and respectable slaveholder, recently dead. The
chances of war threw it into the hands of our troops, and the virtue of
a noble surgeon rescued it from defiling uses, and sent it to me, as one
whose duty bound him to know the worst. Of its authenticity there is not
a shadow of question. And such a record of pollution,--of wallowing, to
which the foulness of swine is as the life of honey-bees harboring in
the bosoms of roses,--I deliberately suppose can never have got into
black and white before. Save in general terms, I can hardly speak of it;
but one item I must have the courage to suggest more definitely. Having
bidden a young slave-girl (whose name, age, color, etc., with the
shameless precision that marks the entire document, are given) to attend
upon his brutal pleasure, and she silently remaining away, he
writes,--"Next morning ordered her a dozen lashes for disobedience."[7]
For disobedience, observe! She had been "hired for life"; the great
Carlyle had witnessed the bargain; and behold, she has broken the
contract! She must be punished; Mr. Carlyle and his co-cultivator of the
virtue of obedience (_par nobile fratrum_) will see to it that she is
duly punished. She shall go to the whipping-post, this disobedient
virgin; she shall have twelve lashes, (for the Chelsea gods are severe,
and know the use of "beneficent whip,")--twelve lashes on the naked
person,--blows with the terrible slave-whip, beneath which the skin
purples in long, winding lines, then breaks and gushes into spirts of
red blood, and afterwards cicatrizes into perpetual scars; for
disobedience is an immorality not to be overlooked!

Yes, Thomas Carlyle, I hold you a party to these crimes. _You_, YOU are
the brutal old man who would flog virgins into prostitution. You approve
the system; you volunteer your best varnish in its commendation; and
this is an inseparable and _legal_ part of it. Legal, I say,--legal, and
not destructive of respectability. That is the point. In ordering such
lashes, that ancient miscreant (for old he already was) neither violated
any syllable of the slave-code, nor forfeited his social position. He
was punishing "disobedience"; he was admministering "justice"; he was
illustrating the "rights of property"; he was using the lawful
"privileges of gentlemen."

No doubt, deeds of equal infamy are done in the dens of New York. But
in New York