dge, as an old fugitive once told me he
had done: 'I took my own legs for security, and walked off.'

I know a fugitive slave who was taught the trade of a blacksmith, and
who stole the art of writing; and a sad use he made of his
accomplishments; he forged free papers with his pen, and the sacred seal
of the State of Alabama with his tools, and then started North. In
Tennessee he got out of money, and stopped to work at his trade, was
suspected, brought before a court, his papers examined and pronounced
genuine, and he passed on to Canada or elsewhere. Surely this man did
not know how to take care of himself!

There is no great reason why the slave should exert himself very much,
and why he should not, cannot be better stated than by the Rev. Mr.
McTeyire, the son of a large planter in South Carolina. 'Men,' he says,
'who own few slaves, and who share the labors of the field or workshop
with them, are very liable to deceive themselves by a specious process
of reasoning: they say, "I carry row for row with my negroes, and I put
no more on them than I take on myself." But the master who thus reasons
is forgetful or ignorant of the great truth that the negroes' powers of
endurance are less than his, while in the case of the latter there are
wanting those incentives which animate and actually strengthen the
master. This labor is for him, the gains of this excess of industry are
to make him rich. What is the servant bettered by the additional bale of
cotton extorted from exhausted nature, only that next year he shall have
more companions in the field, and the field be enlarged?' This is
extremely well put; but Rev. Mr. McTeyire, of South Carolina, must have
been unaware of the fact that it is not possible for a white man to work
row for row on cotton!

But Southern planters are not without some ingenious machines. In a
_premium_ essay upon the cultivation of cotton, read before the Georgia
Agricultural Society, the Hon. Mr. Chambers thus describes one invented
by himself for covering the seed: 'I would cover with a board made of
some hard wood, an inch or an inch and a half thick, about eight inches
broad, beveled on the lower edge to make it sharp, slightly notched in
the middle so as to _straddle_ the row, and screwed on the foot of a
common shovel.' Very safe for negroes to use, not being complicated.

But in the protests of intelligent Southern men, when they occasionally
wake up to the terrible results of their mode