“one shirt and one pair of pantaloons!"[D]_two hours and a half_ only, for rest and refreshment in the twenty-four![E]—­their dwellings, hovels, unfit for human residence, with but one apartment, where both sexes and all ages herd promiscuously at night, like the beasts of the field.[F] Add to this, the ignorance, and degradation;[G] the daily sunderings of kindred, the revelries of lust, the lacerations and baptisms of blood, sanctioned by law, and patronized by public sentiment.  What was the bondage of Egypt when compared with this?  And yet for her oppression of the poor, God smote her with plagues, and trampled her as the mire, till she passed away in his wrath, and the place that knew her in her pride, knew her no more.  Ah!  “I have seen the afflictions of my people, and I have heard their groanings, and am come down to deliver them.”  HE DID COME, and Egypt sank a ruinous heap, and her blood closed over her.  If such was God’s retribution for the oppression of heathen Egypt, of how much sorer punishment shall a Christian people be thought worthy, who cloak with religion a system, in comparison with which the bondage of Egypt dwindles to nothing?  Let those believe who can, that God commissioned his people to rob others of all their rights, while he denounced against them wrath to the uttermost, if they practised the far lighter oppression of Egypt—­which robbed its victims of only the least and cheapest of their rights, and left the females unplundered even of these.  What!  Is God divided against himself?  When He had just turned Egypt into a funeral pile; while his curse yet blazed upon her unburied dead, and his bolts still hissed amidst her slaughter, and the smoke of her torment went upwards because she had “ROBBED THE POOR,” did He license the VICTIMS of robbery to rob the poor of ALL?  As Lawgiver, did he create a system tenfold more grinding than that for which he had just hurled Pharaoh headlong, and overwhelmed his princes and his hosts, till “hell was moved to meet them at their coming?”

[Footnote C:  See law of North Carolina, Haywood’s Manual 524-5.  To show that slaveholders are not better than their laws.  We give a few testimonies.  Rev. Thomas Clay, of Georgia, (a slaveholder,) in an address before the Georgia presbytery, in 1834, speaking of the slave’s allowance of food, says:—­“The quantity allowed by custom is a peck of corn a week.” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser of May 30, 1788, says, “a single peck of corn a week, or the like measure of rice, is the ordinary quantity of provision for a hard-working slave; to which a small quantity of meat is occasionally, though rarely, added.”

The Gradual Emancipation Society of North Carolina, in their Report for 1836, signed Moses Swaim, President, and William Swaim, Secretary, says, in describing the condition of slaves in the Eastern part of that State, “The master puts the unfortunate wretches upon short allowances, scarcely sufficient for their sustenance, so that a great part of them go half naked and half starved much of the time.”  See Minutes of the American Convention, convened in Baltimore, Oct. 25, 1826.