up to be looked at.  So long as it is human nature to wear the best side out, so long the northern guests of southern slaveholders will see next to nothing of the reality of slavery.  Those visitors may still keep up their autumnal migrations to the slave states, and, after a hasty survey of the tinsel hung before the curtain of slavery, without a single glance behind it, and at the paint and varnish that cover up dead men’s bones, and while those who have hoaxed them with their smooth stories and white-washed specimens of slavery, are tittering at their gullibility, they return in the spring on the same fool’s-errand with their predecessors, retailing their lesson, and mouthing the praises of the masters, and the comforts of the slaves.  They now become village umpires in all disputes about the condition of the slaves, and each thence forward ends all controversies with his oracular, “I’ve seen, and sure I ought to know.”

[Footnote 23:  Well saith the Scripture, “A gift blindeth the eyes.”  The slaves understand this, though the guest may not; they know very well that they have no sympathy to expect from their master’s guests; that the good cheer of the “big house,” and the attentions shown them, will generally commit them in their master’s favor, and against themselves.  Messrs. Thome and Kimball, in their late work, state the following fact, in illustration of this feeling among the negro apprentices in Jamaica.

“The governor of one of the islands, shortly after his arrival, dined with one of the wealthiest proprietors.  The next day one of the negroes of the estate said to another, “De new gubner been poison’d.”  “What dat you say?” inquired the other in astonishment, “De gubner been poison’d!  Dah, now!—­How him poisoned?” “Him eat massa’s turtle soup last night,” said the shrewd negro.  The other took his meaning at once; and his sympathy for the governor was turned into concern for himself, when he perceived that the poison was one from which he was likely to suffer more than his excellency.”—­Emancipation in the West Indies, p. 334.]

But all northern visitors at the south are not thus easily gulled.  Many of them, as the preceding pages show, have too much sense to be caught with chaff.

We may add here, that those classes of visitors whose representations of the treatment of slaves are most influential in moulding the opinions of the free states, are ministers of the gospel, agents of benevolent societies, and teachers who have traveled and temporarily resided in the slave states—­classes of persons less likely than any others to witness cruelties, because slaveholders generally take more pains to keep such visitors in ignorance than others, because their vocations would furnish them fewer opportunities for witnessing them, and because they come in contact with a class of society in which fewer atrocities are committed than in any other, and that too, under circumstances which make it almost impossible for them to witness those which are actually committed.