“The ‘regular’ fighting will be continued three days, and from the large number of ‘game uns’ on both sides and in the adjacent country, will be prolonged no doubt a fourth.  To prevent confusion and promote ‘sport,’ the Pit will be enclosed and furnished with seats; so that those having a curiosity to witness a species of diversion originating in a better day (for they had no rag money then,) can have that very natural feeling gratified.

“The Petersburg Constellation is requested to copy.”

Horse-racing too, as every body knows, is a favorite amusement of slaveholders.  Every slave state has its race course, and in the older states almost every county has one on a small scale.  There is hardly a day in the year, the weather permitting, in which crowds do not assemble at the south to witness this barbarous sport.  Horrible cruelty is absolutely inseparable from it.  Hardly a race occurs of any celebrity in which some one of the coursers is not lamed, ’broken down,’ or in some way seriously injured, often for life, and not unfrequently they are killed by the rupture of some vital part in the struggle.  When the heats are closely contested, the blood of the tortured animal drips from the lash and flies at every leap from the stroke of the rowel.  From the breaking of girths and other accidents, their riders (mostly slaves) are often thrown and maimed or killed.  Yet these amusements are attended by thousands in every part of the slave states.  The wealth and fashion, the gentlemen and ladies of the ‘highest circles’ at the south, throng the race course.

That those who can fasten steel spurs upon the legs of dunghill fowls, and goad the poor birds to worry and tear each other to death—­and those who can crowd by thousands to witness such barbarity—­that those who can throng the race-course and with keen relish witness the hot pantings of the life-struggle, the lacerations and fitful spasms of the muscles, swelling through the crimsoned foam, as the tortured steeds rush in blood-welterings to the goal—­that such, should look upon the sufferings of their slaves with, indifference is certainly small wonder.

Perhaps we shall be told that there are thronged race-courses at the North.  True, there are a few, and they are thronged chiefly by Southerners, and ‘Northern men with Southern principles,’ and supported mainly by the patronage of slaveholders who summer at the North.  Cock-fighting and horse-racing are “Southern institutions.”  The idleness, contempt of labor, dissipation, sensuality, brutality, cruelty, and meanness, engendered by the habit of making men and women work without pay, and flogging them if they demur at it, constitutes a congenial soil out of which cock-fighting and horse-racing are the spontaneous growth.

Again,—­The kind treatment of the slaves is often argued from the liberal education and enlarged views of slaveholders.  The facts and reasonings of the preceding pages have shown, that ’liberal education,’ despotic habits and ungoverned passions work together with slight friction.  And every day’s observation shows that the former is often a stimulant to the latter.