has the poor slave, with the arm of legislative justice paralysed, and an arm nerved with human passion his only hope of mercy?—­for self-defence, that first law of nature, is the highest crime he can be guilty of:  and, while considering the mercenary view of self-interest, let it not be forgotten that an awful amount of human suffering is quite compatible with unimpaired health, and that a slave may be frequently under the lash and yet fully able to do his day’s work.

The last influence we have to consider is indeed the brightest and best of all—­Christianity:  high on the brotherly arch of man’s duty to his fellow-man, and forming its enduring keystone, we read, traced by Jehovah in imperishable letters, radiant with love, “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you;” “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”  Surely it needs no words of mine to show, that a faithful history of the most Christian country in the most Christian times the world ever witnessed, would contain, fearful evidence of the cruelty of man setting at nought the above blessed precept.  Nay, more—­I question if, viewed in its entire fulness, there is any one single command in Scripture more habitually disregarded.  Proverbs are generally supposed to be a condensation of facts or experiences.  Whence comes “Every one for himself, and God for us all”? or, the more vulgar one, “Go ahead, and the d——­l take the hindmost?” What are they but concentrations of the fact that selfishness is man’s ruling passion?  What are most laws made for, but to restrain men by human penalties from a broach of the law of love? and, if these laws be needful in communities, all the members of which are equal in the eyes of the law, and even then be found inefficient for their purpose, as may be daily witnessed in every country, who will say that the influence of Christianity is sufficient protection to the poor slave?

There is only one other influence that I shall mention—­that is habit; it acts for and against the slave.  Thus, the kind and good, brought up among slaves, very often nursed by them, and grown up in the continual presence of their gentleness and faithfulness, repay them with unmeasured kindness, and a sympathy in all their sickness and their sorrows, to a degree which I feel quite certain the most tender-hearted Christian breathing could never equal, if landed among slaves, for the first time, at years of maturity.  The Christian planter’s wife or daughter may be seen sitting up at night, cooking, nursing, tending an old sick and helpless slave, with nearly, if not quite, the same affectionate care she would bestow upon a sick relation, the very friendlessness of the negro stimulating the benevolent heart.  This is, indeed, the bright side of the influence of habit.—­But the other side is not less true; and there the effect is, that a coarse, brutal mind, trained up among those it can bully with impunity, acquires a heartlessness and indifference to the negro’s wants and sufferings, that grow with the wretched possessor’s growth.  This is the dark side of the influence of habit.