I may here mention a regulation of the Foreign-office, which, however necessary it may be considered, every one must admit presses very hardly on British employes in the Slave States.  I allude to the regulation by which officials are prevented from employing other people’s slaves as their servants.  White men soon earn enough money to be enabled to set up in some trade, business, or farm, and, as service is looked down upon, they seize the first opportunity of quitting it, even although their comforts may be diminished by the change.  Free negroes won’t serve, and the official must not employ a slave; thus, a gentleman sent out to look after the interest of his country, and in his own person to uphold its dignity, must either submit to the dictation and extortion of his white servant—­if even then he can keep him—­or he may be called upon suddenly, some fine morning, to do all the work of housemaid, John, cook, and knife and button boy, to the neglect of those duties he was appointed by his country to perform, unless he be a married man with a large family, in which case he may perhaps delegate to them the honourable occupations, above named.  Surely there is something a little puritanical in the prohibition.  To hold a slave is one thing, but to employ the labour of one who is a slave, and over whose hopes of freedom you have no control, is quite another thing; and I hold that, under the actual circumstances, the employment of another’s slave could never he so distorted in argument as to bring home a charge of connivance in a system we so thoroughly repudiate.

Go to the East, follow in imagination your ambassadors, ministers, and consular authorities.  Behold them on the most friendly terms—­or striving to be so—­with people in high places, who are but too often revelling in crimes, with the very name of which they would scorn even to pollute their lips; and I would ask, did such a monstrous absurdity ever enter into any one’s head as to doubt from these amicable relations whether the Government of this country or its agents repudiated such abomination of abominations?  If for political purposes you submit to this latter, while for commercial purposes you refuse to tolerate the former, surely you are straining at a black gnat while swallowing a beastly camel.  Such, good people of the Foreign-office, is my decided view of the case; and if you profit by the hint, you will do what I believe no public body ever did yet.  Perhaps, therefore, the idea of setting the fashion may possibly induce you to reconsider and rectify an absurdity, which, while no inconvenience to you, is often a very great one to those you employ.  It is wonderful, the difference in the view taken of affairs by actors on the spot and spectators at a distance.  A man who sees a fellow-creature half crushed to death and crippled for life by some horrible accident, is too often satisfied with little more than a passing “Good gracious!” but if, on his returning homeward, some gigantic waggon-wheel scrunch the mere tip of his toes, or annihilate a bare inch of his nose, his ideas of the reality of an accident become immensely enlarged.