be "wiser in their
generation than the children of light," and they ensure their
safety by forbidding light to enter among them. By the law of
Virginia it is penal to teach any slave to read, and it is penal
to be aiding and abetting in the act of instructing them. This
law speaks volumes. Domestic slaves are, generally speaking,
tolerably well fed, and decently clothed; and the mode in which
they are lodged seems a matter of great indifference to them.
They are rarely exposed to the lash, and they are carefully
nursed in sickness. These are the favourable features of their
situation. The sad one is, that they may be sent to the south
and sold. This is the dread of all the slaves north of
Louisiana. The sugar plantations, and more than all, the rice
grounds of Georgia and the Carolinas, are the terror of American
negroes; and well they may be, for they open an early grave to
thousands; and to _avoid loss_ it is needful to make their
previous labour pay their value.

There is something in the system of breeding and rearing negroes
in the Northern States, for the express purpose of sending them
to be sold in the South, that strikes painfully against every
feeling of justice, mercy, or common humanity. During my
residence in America I became perfectly persuaded that the state
of a domestic slave in a gentleman's family was preferable to
that of a hired American "help," both because they are more cared
for and valued, and because their condition being born with them,
their spirits do not struggle against it with that pining
discontent which seems the lot of all free servants in America.
But the case is widely different with such as, in their own
persons, or those of their children, "loved in vain," are exposed
to the dreadful traffic above mentioned. In what is their
condition better than that of the kidnapped negroes on the coast
of Africa? Of the horror in which this enforced migration is
held I had a strong proof during our stay in Virginia. The
father of a young slave, who belonged to the lady with whom we
boarded, was destined to this fate, and within an hour after it
was made known to him, he sharpened the hatchet with which he had
been felling timber, and with his right hand severed his left
from the wrist.

But this is a subject on which I do not mean to dilate; it has
been lately treated most judiciously by a far abler hand. [See
Captain Hall's Travels in America.] Its effects on the moral
feeli