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 feelings and external manners of the people are all I wish to observe upon, and these are unquestionably most injurious.  The same man who beards his wealthier and more educated neighbour with the bullying boast, “I’m as good as you,” turns to his slave, and knocks him down, if the furrow he has ploughed, or the log he has felled, please not this stickler for equality.  There is a glaring falsehood on the very surface of such a man’s principles that is revolting.  It is not among the higher classes that the possession of slaves produces the worst effects.  Among the poorer class of landholders, who are often as profoundly ignorant as the negroes they own, the effect of this plenary power over males and females is most demoralising; and the kind of coarse, not to say brutal, authority which is exercised, furnishes the most disgusting moral spectacle I ever witnessed.  In all ranks, however, it appeared to me that the greatest and best feelings of the human heart were paralyzed by the relative positions of slave and owner.  The characters, the hearts of children, are irretrievably injured by it.  In Virginia we boarded for some time in a family consisting of a widow and her four daughters, and I there witnessed a scene strongly indicative of the effect I have mentioned.  A young female slave, about eight years of age, had found on the shelf of a cupboard a biscuit, temptingly buttered, of which she had eaten a considerable portion before she was observed.  The butter had been copiously sprinkled with arsenic for the destruction of rats, and had been thus most incautiously placed by one of the young ladies of the family.  As soon as the circumstance was known, the lady of the house came to consult me as to what had best be done for the poor child; I immediately mixed a large cup of mustard and water (the most rapid of all emetics) and got the little girl to swallow it.  The desired effect was instantly produced, but the poor child, partly from nausea, and partly from the terror of hearing her death proclaimed by half a dozen voices round her, trembled so violently that I thought she would fall.  I sat down in the court where we were standing, and, as a matter of course, took the little sufferer in my lap.  I observed a general titter among the white members of the family, while the black stood aloof, and looked stupified.  The youngest of the family, a little girl about the age of the young slave, after gazing at me for a few moments in utter astonishment, exclaimed “My!  If Mrs. Trollope has not taken her in her lap, and wiped her nasty mouth!  Why I would not have touched her mouth for two hundred dollars!”