No doubt the light of truth, which the abolitionists are pouring into the dark den of slavery, greatly excites the monster’s wrath:  and it may be, that he vents a measure of it on the helpless and innocent victims within his grasp.  Be it so;—­it is nevertheless, not the Ithuriel spear of truth, that is to be held guilty of the harm:—­it is the monster’s own depravity, which cannot

“endure Touch of celestial temper, but returns Of force to its own likeness."[A]

[Footnote A:  This is a reference to a passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan in disguise is touched by the spear of the archangel Ithuriel and is thereby forced to return to his own form.]

I am, however, far from believing, that the treatment of the slaves is rendered any more rigorous and cruel by the agitation of the subject of slavery.  I am very far from believing, that it is any harsher now than it was before the organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  Fugitive slaves tell us, it is not:  and, inasmuch as the slaveholders are, and, by both words and actions, abundantly show, that they feel that they are, arraigned by the abolitionists before the bar of the civilized world, to answer to the charges of perpetrating cruelties on their slaves, it would, unless indeed, they are of the number of those “whose glory is in their shame,” be most unphilosophical to conclude, that they are multiplying proofs of the truth of those charges, more rapidly than at any former stage of their barbarities.  That slaveholders are not insensible to public opinion and to the value of a good character was strikingly exhibited by Mr. Calhoun, in his place in the Senate of the United States, when he followed his frank disclaimer of all suspicion, that the abolitionists are meditating a war against the slaveholder’s person, with remarks evincive of his sensitiveness under the war, which they are waging against the slaveholder’s character.

A fact occurs to me, which goes to show, that the slaveholders feel themselves to be put upon their good behavior by the abolitionists.  Although slaves are murdered every day at the South, yet never, until very recently, if at all, has the case occurred, in which a white man has been executed at the South for the murder of a slave.  A few months ago, the Southern newspapers brought us copies of the document, containing the refusal of Governor Butler of South Carolina to pardon a man, who had been convicted of the murder of a slave.  This document dwells on the protection due to the slave; and, if I fully recollect its character, an abolitionist himself could hardly have prepared a more appropriate paper for the occasion.  Whence such a document—­whence, in the editorial captions to this document, the exultation over its triumphant refutations of the slanders of the abolitionists against the South—­but, that Governor Butler feels—­but, that the writes of those captions feel—­that the abolitionists have put the South upon her good behavior.