airs in a circle of
smaller slaves, gives loose to the worst of passions; and thus nursed,
educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it
with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy, who can retain
his morals and manners undepraved in such circumstances."

In a community where all the labor is done by one class there must of
course be another class who live in indolence; and we all know how much
people that have nothing to do are tempted by what the world calls
pleasures; the result is, that slaveholding states and colonies are
proverbial for dissipation. Hence, too, the contempt for industry,
which prevails in such a state of society.--Where none work but slaves,
usefulness becomes degradation. The wife of a respectable mechanic,
who accompanied her husband from Massachusetts to the South, gave great
offence to her new neighbors by performing her usual household
avocations; they begged her to desist from it, (offering the services
of their own blacks,) because the sight of a white person engaged in
any labor was extremely injurious to the slaves; they deemed it very
important that the negroes should be taught, both by precept and
example, that they alone were made to work!

Whether the undue importance attached to merely external gentility, and
the increasing tendency to indolence and extravagance throughout this
country, ought to be attributed, in any degree, to the same source, I
am unable to say; if _any_ influence comes to us from the example and
ridicule of the slaveholding states, it certainly must be of this nature.

There is another view of this system, which I cannot unveil so
completely as it ought to be. I shall be called bold for saying so
much; but the facts are so important, that it is a matter of conscience
not to be fastidious.

The negro woman is unprotected either by law or public opinion. She is
the property of her master, and her daughters are his property. They
are allowed to have no conscientious scruples, no sense of shame, no
regard for the feelings of husband, or parent; they must be entirely
subservient to the will of their owner, on pain of being whipped as near
unto death as will comport with his interest, or quite to death, if it
suit his pleasure.

Those who know human nature would be able to conjecture the unavoidable
result, even if it were not betrayed by the amount of mixed population.
Think for a moment, what a degrading effect must be produced on